


Controlled, or, the Artist's Heart is a Large Expanse

by terrafirma



Category: Persona 5
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, But then we have..., Canon-Typical Violence, Falling In Love, Hand Jobs, Love Confessions, M/M, Making Out, Mutual Masturbation, Mutual Pining, Oral Sex, Past Abuse, Sharing a Bed, Yusuke has a Palace for a bit
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-01
Updated: 2019-05-01
Packaged: 2020-01-23 03:32:23
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 13
Words: 47,769
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18541408
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/terrafirma/pseuds/terrafirma
Summary: Yusuke had been so young, so vulnerable. Nakanohara and the other students had, too - but this time, he had the wherewithal to drag Yusuke with him when he left Madarame. As a result, by Yusuke's second year of high school, he finds himself in the care of two overly protective people; Madarame's re-entrance into the scene doesn't help much, either. However, as always, the Phantom Thieves step in to fix things and feelings develop along the way.(Or, an AU set in May of Persona 5, where Yusuke hadn't grown up entirely under Madarame's thumb. Fem!OC is another of Madarame's former students.)





	1. May 14th

**Author's Note:**

> Hello, and welcome to my first published piece for Persona 5! Yusuke is one of my favorite characters that I've ever come across so I love to make him suffer. Hopefully, though, I don't put him (or you, dear reader!) through too many ringers before he ends up with everyone's favorite Joker. 
> 
> (( This was entirely inspired by @hydrangeatattoo on Twitter's post for shukita week day 6! You can see that darling piece right here: https://twitter.com/hydrangeatattoo/status/1119338352602484736 // Honestly, the quiet looks they share. I dieeee ))

 

It was dark and humid that night, like always. In the atelier, his first and only home, the weather seemed to sneak in through the windows and swallow him whole. Summers especially, the cicada song close and thick, were something he dreaded if for no other reason than the heat.

Ever since he was a child, Yusuke found that that awful humidity made him more susceptible to illness than the other children in the atelier. The higher the temperature soared, the less he could focus on the paints by his hand or the figure in front of him. Not only did it seem to render him incompetent, it also frustrated him. Accurately depicting someone behind a sheen of sweat was more difficult than practical.

That fateful night, he had been sweating through his sheets and staring almost listlessly into the window, praying for some breeze to filter through. The other boy sleeping nearby, on the other hand, was completely content to sleep shirtless and sprawled out like the child he was.

Even looking at him made Yusuke feel uncomfortably warm.

Then, when he felt arms wrap around his underarms, felt hands clasp at the back of his knees, felt his whole perspective shifting until he was entirely upside down, he assumed that it was the fog of some oncoming cold he needed to better fight off.

Maybe he would ask Madarame-sensei – or better yet, one of the older children – the next morning for something hearty to eat. It  _had_ been a day or so since his last real meal.

His eyes closed just as he thought he saw someone packing his belongings into a large duffel bag. The whispers exchanged between those packing, louder than the insects now so far off, were the only thing that set him on edge. All of the students were always supposed to be quiet once the sun went down and, even if the rule wasn't followed as strictly as Sensei wanted, surely Nakanohara-sempai and the other older children would have hidden their mischief better.

_*_

 

"He was in middle school then, Natsu," a female voice chided. Through the wall that separated the bedroom and the rest of the apartment (and the thick layer of sleep fogging up his mind), Yusuke wasn't sure if it was Nakanohara's latest girlfriend or Takahashi-san that spoke.

"I know, but he shouldn't have to face things like this yet," Nakanohara sighed. 

"And I agree — "

"Then why do you keep bringing it up, Kanna?" 

Ah, so it was Takahashi-san. She continued. " — but the exhibition is so nearby this time, and he'll have even more questions than usual. Just because we're working now doesn't mean that he's given up on the idea of all of us being one big art family again." Her voice dropped in volume. “Maybe even with Sensei.”

Yusuke could hear Nakanohara sigh. A chair scraped across the floor, shoes seemingly resisted being put on, and a quiet, "I'll be back around dinner time," was said.

"It’s your turn to cook tonight. I have second shift at the hospital again today," Takahashi-san called just before the door opened and closed.

Looking at the clock on his phone, Yusuke could have stayed in bed for another ten minutes, but he knew he'd only fall back asleep. Instead, he rolled over and unplugged his phone from the charger. Once off the bed, he stepped over to the closet that the three of them shared. 

There had been four of them there until this school year, but that former student just older than Yusuke had said her goodbyes and gone off to university properly that trimester. Things had been just as cramped at Madarame's atelier, as far as he recalled, but there was something decidedly friendlier about the bickering here. About the closeness. 

Looking in the mirror and seeing three small beds pushed in far enough corners to create some semblance of personal space, Yusuke frowned to himself. What made this place different?

It didn't feel forced, he supposed, and he walked over into to the kitchen and living room area. The television that was set up across from the couch was turned on, muted, like Takahashi-san liked. On it, a man and a woman were chatting about some “revolutionized” knife set.

"Good morning, Yusuke-kun" Takahashi-san looked at her watch, a look of confusion passing over her face. "Are you really leaving for school already?" 

"I have some work I need to finish up before class begins for the day," he said by way of explanation. "What would you like for dinner?" 

Her grin returned, the smallest hint of wrinkles at her eyes revealing themselves. "Natsu can manage for all of us, don't worry." She paused for a second. “Did we wake you up?”

 _Deeply, harshly, Yusuke wanted to cry out,_ _let me help, too!_ Instead, he asked, "Where will the exhibition you mentioned be set up this time?"

Takahashi-san blinked slowly, as if buying time. "I'm sure I don't know what you mean. Here," she shoved a wrapped lunch in his direction. "You should still have enough pocket money for the train and something to eat for breakfast, right? This is for later. I’ll be back late tonight, so don’t wait up for me."

“I appreciate it as always,” he replied, still a touch annoyed, and slipped on his shoes. "I'll be off now."

"Good luck with those finishing touches," she waved.

He looked at her, confused, so she furrowed her brow,

"On your painting?"

"Ah," he looked the other way and walked out the door. "Yes, thank you."

 It hadn't been a lie when he mentioned the work he planned to do, so why did it feel like he was flinging himself out of the apartment as fast as he could manage? Yusuke fiddled with the hem on the strap of his school bag and continued on towards the train station.

And why did things feel a little off so often? Almost… _unbalanced_? Nakanohara and Takahashi-san both were extraordinarily nice people, Yusuke reasoned, so shouldn't that make him feel as at home with them in the apartment as he did in Madarame's atelier?

Maybe it was a matter of time. After all, it  _had_ only been a couple of years since the four of them had fled. Yusuke had been a middle schooler then; now, he was a second-year student in high school.

Standing at the edge of the train platform, he nodded solemnly to himself, resolved. Yes, that must be it. Thirteen, fourteen years at one place and only two and some change in another simply was too difficult a comparison. Da Vinci and Van Gogh were both brilliant, but in entirely different ways. 

That had to be it, right?

The train, like any morning, was stuffed entirely full of people. Finding a seat wasn't necessarily Yusuke's priority, though. When he stepped into the train car itself, he simply began scanning the roofline for spare hand holds hanging down. For some reason, when he couldn't get to one, he felt as though ever stop and start of the train jostled him beyond repair. Even if he was packed into the mass of humanity like a tinned fish, he hated to feel out of control of his movements. 

One hanging handle was free towards the middle of the car and, because Kosei Academy was a ways away, Yusuke decided that it would probably be wise to stay some distance from the spaces closest to the doors. He disliked it when other people jabbed elbows and briefcases into his side in their rush to find a place to stand before the train began moving again. When he finally had a grip on his desired place, he took note of his surroundings like normal. There were advertisements along the lighted upper edge of the train that all spoke to his former sensei's upcoming exhibition. He fought off a sneer. 

They really had been talking about Madarame without him that morning.

Apparently, he was unsuccessful from keeping his expression neutral, because he heard someone near him chuckle from behind a hand. 

Yusuke looked around, his face screwed up in a look that dared the mocking party to 'say it to his face,' as it were.

A student around his age who sat directly to his side on the long, overcrowded bench seats waved his hand. "Down here," the dark-haired, bespectacled student said.

"Excuse me?" Yusuke acted indignantly. "Who do you think you are to judge someone's taste in art?"

The boy's face seemed like a blank canvas, even and measured. He took a minute to respond, as if he was seeing the ads along the car wall for the first time. "Do you have some connection to the exhibit? Is your work on display?"

Yusuke scowled further. "I would hope for the opposite, all things considered. The artist in question is unworthy of taking up the space," he replied. 

"Is there a reason?"

"He..." Yusuke trailed off, looking in the other direction. Nakanohara would have told him to pick his battles. He decided to drop it, even if following the older boy’s orders felt off. "It is none of your concern."

There was something like mischief in the other boy's eyes when Yusuke glanced back. "You really care about art." It wasn't a jab; it was a carefully considered observation. 

"It is what I value most in this world," Yusuke answered, feeling the palm of his hand grasping at the handle overhead grow sweaty. 

The train jolted itself, suddenly slowed down, and squealed to a stop. When the other boy stood to his feet, he adjusted his school bag and stuck his hands in his pockets. "Kurusu Akira," he said without preamble. 

"Excuse me?"

He pulled out his phone and tapped a couple of buttons. "I'd like to talk art with you sometime," he shrugged. 

Yusuke stuttered a little, registering that his space was full of this stranger and his lifted arm was growing numb. They were standing too close to each other, weren't they? This wasn't some social cue he had missed, right? Instead of thinking too hard about it, he pulled his phone from his pocket and opened up his contact list. 

They swapped phones and, after the press of a few buttons, exchanged both numbers and glances.

"Kitagawa Yusuke," Kurusu-san read. "It was nice to meet you," he smiled and returned to his measured look in almost the same moment. 

"Likewise," Yusuke tried to do the same, but he could tell it came out more like a frown. What exactly was the boy in front of him thinking?

"This is my stop, Kitagawa-san," Kurusu-san said. "Maybe I'll see you in the station sometime after school."

“Perhaps.”

Sitting in the now unoccupied space that the strange boy had just left, Yusuke couldn't help but feel like he really _had_ overlooked something. 

His gaze drifted upwards, however, and he felt his anger and – was that a sense of betrayal? – return in full force. 

 

*

 

By the time Yusuke could regain his focus, he was sweating through his uniform clothes in one of the workshops still open after school. The light shone perfectly through the windows for him, however, so he worked despite the temperature.

To get the most interesting shading yet on the figure drawing - a classmate with her head turned away from the viewer, her torso crumpling in on itself, her legs nearly shaking even in the stillness of portraiture – he busied himself. Even though the assignment wouldn't come due for a while, he couldn't seem to take his mind off of the sort of expression he wanted to give this composition. The feel overall still alluded him, as well.

He had been so absent-minded when copying down the girl’s general posture that he had neglected to give her true face a good enough sketch to copy down for later and, as it was, she now wore a blank space rather than anything more detailed.

If he was younger, he might have called it her ‘mask’ and moved on to getting the folds on the school-issued uniform skirt just right. Perhaps he still would.

The charcoal in his hands was warm and felt almost loose in his grasp. Stray marks along the canvas (that frustrated him beyond belief) smudged onto his arms and shirt as well. By the time he finished up for the evening, he expected his face to have smears of charcoal along it, too. He placed the pigmented utensil down and wiped his hands on his pants.

Maybe he ought to take a look at it from a different angle, he considered, and stood up to frame the smaller details of the piece in with his thumb and forefingers. This way, his palms blocked out the rest of the drawing.

It really _would_ do for a day’s progress; it was due at the end of the trimester. Coming up, he had several chapters to read in a book for his literature class as well as a history assignment in his performing arts course to work on. 

But - and the back of his mind whispered this rather quietly - it meant that he would need to return to the apartment to complete that work. 

He frowned and dropped his hands to his sides. 

Outside the window, there were several students strolling along the grounds, laughing together and complaining about how much work they had left to do on their different assignments.

Yusuke wanted with some part of himself to join them, to find another person to at least discuss the finer points of brushing techniques with, but the students in his year had largely branded him as either an eccentric or a pervert. 

He didn't know which to be more confused by, honestly. 

When he brought it up with either Nakanohara or Takahashi-san, they simply stared off into space or stumbled their way around an explanation that never sat well with him. It was as if they were avoiding something about him, too, that made him different. Something they were uncomfortable with.

Was he just imagining that?

And then there was the matter of their secretive discussion this morning. Why hadn't they bothered to ask him what he thought about Madarame coming into town for an exhibition? Did they think he was asleep and simply wanted to talk about the topic? It hadn't seemed so; if that was the case, they easily could have woken him.

…Nakanohara had mentioned something like Yusuke not having enough strength to face what 'really happened.'

But Yusuke  _did_ understand. Madarame had been using his students' work for years before either of the people he now lived with had moved into the atelier. Even when Yusuke was young, Madarame had occasionally lifted concepts from his work to use on larger pieces. 

Yusuke wasn't blind when he was a child. He simply had no other alternative. With his mother dead and his father entirely out of the picture, the mentor who took advantage of his artistic abilities was all he had.

He felt his nails digging skinny crescents into his palms. Why didn't these two people who took care of him, who took him in when none of them knew what they were doing, trust him enough to ask his opinion of their former sensei?

Why did they always treat him like a child?

In a rare moment of frustration, Yusuke grabbed at the stool in front of him and flung it into the nearby rack of drying paintings. While the artwork was undamaged, the wire rack shook audibly at the impact. Yusuke could tell by the heat creeping up his neck that he had gone red with embarrassment. He acted exactly in accordance with how they treated him.

No other students, thankfully, were in the room with him then. The last one hard at work had left before the lighting even had splayed its perfection across his canvas; the sun had long since shifted away so that Yusuke's charcoal sketch was covered in much more in shadow. 

He picked up the stool from the ground where it lay toppled and set it upright in its correct position. After placing his piece in progress beside the other work from his class so he could continue working on it during tomorrow's free period, he slung his bag over his shoulder and walked to the library, hoping that the noise level would actually be conducive to completing on homework for once. 

 

*

 

The afternoon wore on and Yusuke holed himself up in the furthest corner cubicle in the library until his legs cramped.

"I simply need to up my water intake," he mumbled to himself as he thought of a grocery list for the evening.

Only lately, when Nakanohara had been tasked to make dinner, had he failed to come through. He always cited something about a girlfriend or someone from his office needing him. Yusuke, in those situations, had been forced to go out to the store long past the point in time when bargains where offered. Something about paying full price for vegetables that an hour before had been half off bothered him. 

If he thought about it too hard, he might have recalled the quiet days of sitting in Madarame's atelier when the only dinner he had was something one of the students could manage to buy on a part-time job's pittance. Even then, it would have been split several ways. Meals weren't the biggest priority when the majority of the funds went to protecting the paintings from whatever climate crisis Madarame worried over that week.

Oh, and if anyone dared to call into question the allocation of said money? What little had been bought would be forced out of everyone's hands and thrown away simply for doubting the goodness of their sensei.

Comparatively, having to make stir-fry a couple nights a week on pocket money he was given by Takahasi-san was nothing. Something still burned about it all, though, even if he couldn't quite place it. That tiny spark of annoyance had burrowed its way under his skin.

Part of him enjoyed being reliable to his roommates; part of him was frustrated with their selfishness.

Yusuke looked around him to get a bearing on his surroundings - when left to his own thoughts, he often got lost - and found himself in the middle of the Shibuya underground mall. Ah, well. At least there was a supermarket down there. Just as he passed in front of the sliding doors of the market, however, something else caught his eye.

Or, well. Some _one_.

The flower shop that he had seen a countless number of times had apparently hired a new employee. 

"Kurusu-san, yes?" Yusuke found himself in front of the counter of the store almost as soon as he noticed the dark-haired student from that morning. 

The other boy nodded, his expression almost hidden behind his glasses. "I'm sorry about this morning."

Yusuke took a step back. "Pardon?"

"The morning, on the train. You express yourself very openly, and it was sort of funny to see someone so early in the day already so..." he trailed off, pushing up his glasses on the bridge of his nose. "Genuine."

"I see."

Kurusu-san's eyes finally looked up to meet Yusuke's, and it was in that moment that Yusuke first noticed that he was a good bit taller than the other boy. "A couple of my friends and I plan on going to that exhibit you mentioned tomorrow after school," he said. "I thought about texting to ask if you wanted to come."

"That's very," Yusuke looked around him, as if his roommates were listening just over his shoulder, "kind of you. However, I don't believe I would be able to join you," he swallowed. "I most likely will have homework to attend to — "

"Please?" Kurusu-san's eyes were almost the color of the charcoal Yusuke had been drawing with earlier that day. But why was he noticing that? Kurusu-san's hand had found its way to the counter, too, just a few inches from Yusuke, and it felt as though he would have taken Yusuke's hands in his own if he could have. 

Ah, he was staring at him with those eyes —

"Akira-san, have you greeted the customer properly?" A slightly older woman wearing a matching apron to Kurusu-san's peeked out from behind the door just beyond the displays of variety of cut flowers rested. 

"Ah, yes, Hanasaki-san." Kurusu-san pulled his hands back towards himself. One scratched at the back of his head absently. 

"Okay! Just making sure," Hanasaki-san - the owner, Yusuke assumed – smiled and closed the door again. 

By the time Kurusu-san turned back to face him, Yusuke had already dashed towards the supermarket. No need to delay his mission any longer. 

 

***

 

Akira flopped face-first into his futon in the attic above Leblanc. The coffee shop below was closed for the night and, despite the overwhelming smell of the caffeinated grounds soaking in to everything he owned, he still felt exhausted from the day. 

"You should at least change into pajamas before you fall asleep," the cat on the windowsill spoke, scratching at his neck with his hind paw. 

"Morgana," Akira rolled over, placing his hands on his stomach, "you only make me jump through hoops to go to sleep when I'm tired."

The cat, if possible, cocked his head to the side and smirked. "I just think you should take care of yourself, Akira."

Akira considered sticking his tongue out at Morgana but thought better of it. He reached for his phone on the futon without looking as if too tired to bother lifting his head. Glancing at it, he noticed several texts from the group message. 

<< ANN (17:15): Did you guys check the Phan-site today?

<< RYUJI (17:23): No, something come up?

<< ANN (17:24): Yeah, from that guy we saw in Mementos just a couple days ago

<< ANN (17:25): That artist guy who used to study under the artist on exhibit this weekend

<< RYUJI (17:30): No shit?

<< RYUJI (17:32): What was his name, Naka-something, yeah? The stalker?

<< ANN (17:35): Nakanohara

<< ANN (17:40): What do you think, Akira? Should we look into it?

<< RYUJI (17:41): What's his post even say? Anything important?

<< ANN (17:45): There's this kid who lived with Madarame

<< RYUJI (17:45): The artist?

<< ANN (17:45): The visiting artist

<< ANN (17:46): Interrupting...

<< ANN (17:47): Apparently the guy is Nakanohara's little brother or something, but anyway he's worried about him

<< ANN (17:48): This guy’s apparently got issues, too, so his older brother is freaking out and asking us to help. It seems nice

 << RYUJI (18:00): We can at least see if he's in Mementos, right? 

<< RYUJI (18:02): He gave a us name, yeah?

<< ANN (18:20): No, not yet... I keep refreshing to see if he'll say anything else

>> AKIRA (22:09): Just got back from work

>> AKIRA (22:09): I invited that artsy guy from the train to the exhibit with us

>> AKIRA (22:10): He kinda ran away from me though ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯

<< ANN (22:17): Aww, you’ll never win him over like thaaaat

 

Akira wanted to take back his having told the others about his sexuality, sometimes. 

 

>> AKIRA (22:23): ...

>> AKIRA (22:24): Did Nakanohara ever post anything else?

<< ANN (22:35): Nope, still nothing

<< ANN (22:36): Trying to ignore Kawakami's homework

<< RYUJI (22:37): I can text Mishima to see if he can message the guy privately or something

<< RYUJI (22:38): ???

>> AKIRA (22:40): Sounds good, let us know if anything changes

<< ANN (22:43): Same with art boy, k? ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡° )

 

When he looked up from his phone, Akira could have  _sworn_ he saw Morgana laughing at him from the window. 


	2. May 16th

"I plan to work on the project for the contest I saw a flier for," Yusuke explained while washing dishes from breakfast that morning. Bits of rice clung to the ceramic of the plate and, as scrubbed particularly hard at one stubborn grain, his face screwed up in concentration.

"Aren’t you way ahead on school work anyway?" Nakanohara called from the bedroom. He leaned against the frame of the door and frowned as he buckled his belt. "You said something about a figure drawing this time, right?"

Yusuke tired of explaining things too many times over. He changed the subject. "If you must know," he paused in his chore and glanced over his shoulder, "I am also going to look for part-time work somewhere."

Nakanohara's frown deepened. "We already have two salaries, though,” he said. “And they cover rent, food, and your art supplies no problem. Honestly, we're lucky to be in the position we're in. Kanna says we could move into a bigger apartment whenever we can get this one packed up. We could let her have her own room that way. Might even be able to upgrade the couch or the TV."

Yusuke sighed. "The size of our living quarters is not a concern of mine," he floundered, his hands moving disjointedly as he stared off into another corner of his vision to try and find the words. Eventually, he gave up and hung his head. "It comes down to you two still treating me like a child."

"I mean, you  _are_ still a kid, though, Yusuke." Nakanohara took his glasses off and wiped them on his tie. "And we haven't been the best," he cleared his throat, "parents for you. You have a lot of weird ideas sometimes. I think it probably stems back to you growing up in with that guy."

The name generally went unspoken, but they both knew that he meant Madarame.

Yusuke put the dishes back into the cabinet quietly, letting only the clinking noises of plates bumping into each other fill the room.

"I'm sorry for ditching dinner duty for a while now," Nakanohara offered in the silence. “I got sidetracked by other things and I hurt both you guys and my ex in the process.”

Rather than reply, Yusuke simply closed the cabinet door.

"Listen, you can get a job if you  _want_ , but we don't need you to. Your scholarship to Kosei is your contribution."

To Yusuke, that seemed like a stretch.

"Please, leave for work. You're almost running late."

"Alright," Nakanohara lifted his hands to his shoulders. "I give up, Yusuke. Do what you want. Just — ah, forget it."

After the door closed, Yusuke felt his knees quaking under him. "My scholarship is my contribution," he muttered into his hands, angry. "You both work yourselves ragged to do everything else and leave me without any means of making myself useful. Can you not see that I  _want_ to pull my weight here?" Without thinking, he kicked at one of the feet of the couch and thrashed when the pain from stubbing his toe jolted up his leg.

"Can you not see that I want to learn what was so apparently odd about our upbringing? Even other _artists_ my age consider me too foreign for their society!" He was digging his nails into his hairline at this point, his whispers shifting into a shout. “An artist can hardly create masterpieces in the vacuum of his own company…”

At that moment, something dawned on him. The boy from the train - Kurusu-san - had suggested he join in with a group of students going to Madarame's exhibition. 

"Maybe I could ask these questions of Sensei directly," Yusuke said, his fingers already flying across the keyboard on-screen.

>> YUSUKE (07:22): I apologize for running the other day; I had to get my shopping done before the store closed. Would it still be possible to join you at the art exhibit this weekend?

 

***

 

"So we're looking for some artsy guy that used to live with this Madarame, right?" Ann asked, twirling the ends of her curly hair in fingers. She had her phone in the other hand and was balanced up against the glass window that overlooked the busy city streets below. 

"And apparently the famous guy's bad enough he caused someone to kill himself," Ryuji added. "Nakanohara said that in Mementos, right?"

Akira nodded. "His shadow mentioned Madarame several times, yes."

"You think Madarame has a palace?" Ann put her phone away and looked between Akira and Ryuji. "If he really did cause someone to commit suicide..."

Something heavy hung in the air then.

"It's all conjecture at this point, but we could always check the MetaNav," Morgana mewled, barely poking his head through the opening in Akira's bag. "If he does, today could be a perfect opportunity to find out about both him and the boy Nakanohara was worried about. Especially if this guy you invited knew either of them."

"Agreed," Akira said. "But we have company now, so we'll have to behave." He cast a glance at Ann and Ryuji in turn, but they laughed him off. "I mean it — "

"Kurusu-san," Kitagawa waved them down from across the walkway, his long strides quickly delivering him to them. 

"Yo," Ryuji grinned, all teeth. "Don't worry about last names with me. It's just Ryuji."

"I'm Ann," she waved back. “It’s nice to meet you.”

Kitagawa seemed surprised, but he bowed slightly and introduced himself as, "You can call me Yusuke, then. It's a pleasure to meet you two."

"And you know that I’m Akira. There's one more of us to meet, though, Yusuke." Akira held up his bag by the parted zipper and revealed Morgana, who poked his head out and meowed.

"Nice to meet you," the cat stuck out a paw from the bag as well. "It's Morgana."

Yusuke's eyes widened. "It's almost like he's talking."

Ann and Ryuji shared a look and barely contained their snickering. 

"May I?" Yusuke asked, his hand hovering over Morgana's head.

"No!" Morgana hissed, "I'm not a cat!"

"Sure," Akira replied politely at almost the same moment. 

When Yusuke scratched at the feline's jaw, however, Morgana was uncharacteristically silent on the matter – even if he did glare at Akira. 

"Shall we, then?" Yusuke gestured to the building across the street that announced, on one of the many electronic screens in Shibuya's commercial center, that Madarame's exhibit would be ongoing until the beginning of June. 

 

*

 

Thankfully, the exhibition appreciated students attending; with the use of their individual ID cards, the four teenagers and their stowaway cat were quickly allowed into the display. 

"I don't think I've seen this many paintings all in one place before," Ann whispered as they stepped into the main room of the exhibit. 

Yusuke nodded knowingly and said, "These sorts of events truly are worth the time and effort. My high school puts on its own exhibit once a trimester and to see the culmination of every student's hard work is truly something to behold."

Ryuji made a gagging motion in Akira's direction - behind Yusuke's line of vision.

Akira shushed him.

"Where do you go to school, Yusuke?" Ann asked, her hands clasped behind her. 

"Kosei," Yusuke answered before, without warning, running from them. “Please, excuse me.”

Akira quirked an eyebrow at the scene but remained quiet. 

Just ahead of them, and where Yusuke had dashed off to, stood a well-dressed older gentleman with his hair in a ponytail and his facial hair neatly trimmed to show off his jawline. He was surrounded by a number of the other patrons of the gallery and, in Akira's best estimation, had to be the Madarame that they were potentially targeting next.

Carefully, Akira pulled his phone out and opened up the MetaNav app.

At the same time, Ryuji hollered, "Yusuke, wait up!" 

And the tinny, feminine voice that Akira silenced a moment too late agreed, "No results found."

Ann frowned and turned back to Akira, hissing something through her teeth that sounded like, “Not _now_ — ” 

— But not before the older man had wrapped his arms around Yusuke, proclaiming, "You've returned to me!"

 

***

 

His mentor - his father-figure, really - was there in the flesh. Something prickled under Yusuke's skin, but it certainly hadn't kept him from sprinting inside the exhibit despite the years of training in etiquette he had received from the very man that now stood before him.

His feet seemed to carry him over to Madarame without thought or consideration for his companions or his surroundings.

Yusuke was welcomed, quite literally, with open arms. 

Madarame's embraces had been so few and far-between in his childhood that Yusuke, truly, had forgotten how they felt. Had... had he even  _been_ embraced since the last time this man held him? 

And how long ago was that?

He almost shivered in the warmth of someone’s arms around him.

"My star pupil," the older man whispered into his ear with all of the affection Yusuke hadn't remembered hearing in years, and then to the public, Madarame declared, "You've returned to me!"

"Sensei," Yusuke found himself saying as if by reflex, "it has been quite some time."

"I must apologize," Madarame assured the press and more prestigious-looking visitors that surrounded them. "We are having something of a homecoming here today, by absolute happenstance." 

One of the reporters, phone in hand, lifted the device to her mouth and asked, "Sir, who exactly is this young man? What is your relationship to him?"

Madarame clapped one arm around Yusuke's shoulder, facing the boy towards the paparazzi, and held on tightly. "This is my most cherished pupil. He studied under me for quite some time, but was lost to me too long ago." His squeezed even harder, almost shook Yusuke in the process, as he continued, "I stayed busy all this time - despite his dear loss to me - hoping only that we would be reconciled at some point in the future." 

The other reporters, more equipped in some cases, began barraging the scene in photography and videography to take in as many angles as they could of this apparently touching reunion.

All of this, however, was lost to Yusuke. He felt only the burning heat of Madarame's hand clasping tighter on his shoulder than he ever could have imagined. The strangest part of it all, though? It felt  _wonderful_. 

It felt  _real_.

 

***

 

“Akira, do you think we need to do something?” Ann leaned into his side, putting her hand on the back of his shoulder.

Something didn’t seem quite right to him, that much was certain, but Akira kept quiet. “I think we let it play out for now.”

“But if this guy is really as bad as we’ve heard,” Ryuji argued, “shouldn’t we at least tell Yusuke?”

“They know each other, from what it seems,” Akira shrugged. Looking around for a moment, he said, “I got that impression from when we met, too. So we either let the scene die down on its own here, or somewhere more obvious.”

Morgana mewled from Akira’s school bag with a wicked glint in his eyes. “I’m guessing you’re not going to let me out to go after some art, huh?”

“Not now, kitty,” Ryuji shoved Morgana further into the bag as he saw Yusuke being released from Madarame’s arms. “Bad timing.”

“I’m not a cat,” Morgana hissed in response.

Ann stepped into Ryuji’s face and pointed at him, her expression revealing how done she was with the situation. “Shut up, both of you!”

“Do you have any further comments?” A reporter asked, directing her accompanying cameraman to get a better view of Madarame for the audience.

“Well, Yusuke?” The older man turned his head towards the lanky boy beside him. “Would you like to say anything?”

In that moment, Akira thought he could see white, hot panic written all over Yusuke’s face.

“I don’t believe I would, Sensei,” he replied, looking hurriedly between the microphone being shoved in his face and his mentor.

“I see,” the reporter sighed, and she moved away from the two of them with the other members of the press slowly dispersing as well.

“My works will be on display for the remainder of the month,” Madarame consoled them, “and I intend to make continual appearances here at the exhibition every day. Please, simply enjoy the work!”

“Do you think we could go talk to them?” Ann asked no one in particular.

“I don’t see why not,” Akira answered, sticking his hands in his pockets. “Yusuke,” he called as he walked up to the two other men. “I didn’t know that you knew the artist in charge of the exhibit.”

Akira was sure that he had some mischief in his expression, knowing full well exactly what Yusuke had thought of Madarame because of their encounter on the train, but he wondered how the taller boy would respond.

He gulped visibly. “Yes, this is Madarame Ichiryusai,” he extended one hand towards Madarame’s direction. “I — “

“Yusuke, I can’t believe you have so many like-minded friends,” Madarame chuckled brightly into one of his robe’s sleeves. “To have a cohort interested in art at your age, that’s quite impressive.”

Yusuke raised his hands defensively as if to explain away the situation, but Akira interrupted,

“But if the two of you are as close as it seems, then why hadn’t we heard about you from Yusuke himself?”

Vaguely, Akira noticed Madarame’s eye twitch. “We have been estranged for quite some time. It’s entirely possible that Yusuke had been too embarrassed about the ordeal to mention me.”

“That’s not it at all, Sensei,” Yusuke sputtered. His eyes darted in several different directions. Was he _that_ on edge?

Ah, this wasn’t going as well as Akira had hoped. Rather than get information out of either of these two, he had managed to put them both on the defensive.

“Surely you three would entertain an old man’s desire to speak with his son, wouldn’t you?”

At this, the Phantom Thieves and Yusuke both startled.

Madarame’s expression softened. “While he isn’t biologically mine, Yusuke and I have been together almost since his birth. I haven’t seen him in quite a while and now he’s returned to me. Consider how we feel.”

What was behind that smile, either, Akira could only wonder.

“Of course, sir,” Ann smiled back, pulling at Ryuji and Akira’s sleeves. “We’d be happy to let you catch up.”

Ryuji turned his head and acted like he was going to tell Ann something, but he closed his mouth just as quickly.

Akira simply nodded, waving at Yusuke. “We’ll be around the exhibit. Text me if you want to meet up when you’re finished.”

“Of course,” Yusuke agreed, but his eyes seemed glazed over, distant. All in all, he looked out of it.

Was leaving him with Madarame the right choice?

But Ann tugged a little more at the boys’ wrists, and Akira had no reason to resist for the moment, so he walked alongside her and kept his suspicions to himself.

 

***

 

That fierce affection Madarame had shown Yusuke confused him just as much as it piqued his curiosity. It had been a while since he had last seen the man who raised him after his mother’s death, but to the best of his ability, he couldn’t remember a time in his life when his mentor had acted so warmly towards him.

Maybe when he was a child, he paused, and he first showed Madarame how eager he was to paint. That day, the artist’s face gleamed with a mix of pride and something that Yusuke had been too young to parse.

Now that he was older, when he considered what expression Madarame was showing him, the memory was too muddy to entirely understand. He had turned it over too many times in his mind to be sure.

It easily could have been something more sinister, like Nakanohara and Takahashi-san would have explained it away as. Perhaps that was when Madarame had decided to begin lifting ideas from other impressionable, young artists. It was possible that Yusuke’s first signs of talent were precisely what had driven the older man into his plagiaristic streak.

He pulled out his phone and briefly considered texting Nakanohara to consult with him.

But… Yusuke  _didn’t_ remember everything perfectly. He had been so young, and it had been so long since he could recall that beaming face with enough clarity to discern anything from it.

It was all entirely probable that Madarame had simply been an excitable father figure in that moment. That he had truly been proud of Yusuke and his following in the artist’s much larger footsteps.

Yusuke had always wanted that to be the case, at least.

As his new acquaintances walked away, their backs turned to him and his former Sensei, Yusuke wondered what it seemed like to them. Was Madarame acting genuinely now, or had he continued on in his manipulative ways?

Had he ever really been  _that_ bad to Yusuke and the others?

“ — suke,” Madarame shook the younger boy’s shoulders a little. “Yusuke, did you hear me?”

Yusuke looked up into the eyes that he had wondered so often about. He couldn’t even recall his mother’s face; in times of trouble growing up, it was only these features that he wanted to look kindly at him. No one else’s praise mattered.

And even with the others gone, Madarame hadn’t let go of him.

“Yes, Sensei?” Yusuke asked, trying his hardest to be present. Ignoring the moment was hardly conducive to discovering the truth.

“My exhibit will be open for some time,” the older man explained, “so you will have plenty of opportunities to come back and look around with your friends. Would you allow me to spend the afternoon with you?”

“Of course,” he nodded without thinking. No one would miss him back home until much later in the day. Besides, he could tell them that he had been working on his schoolwork, anyway.

Madarame’s face seemed to convey an amalgamation of emotions, but Yusuke found himself unable to separate them all neatly.

“I’ll have my driver pull up to the front of the gallery then. We can go somewhere more private to talk if that’s alright.” He was already pulling his phone out and dialing a memorized number. He turned his back to Yusuke and spoke quietly into the receiver for a moment.

After what felt like no time at all, Madarame was directing him out of the exhibit hall and into the wider world of Shibuya. He pointed in the direction of his car and, after waving for the driver to pull up to the curb, even opened the door for Yusuke.

It was like a dream. Was that what felt so strange about this? That Yusuke had only hoped for this sort of attention?

“Thank you,” Yusuke said after settling into the car and placing his previously tightly clutched phone to his side. With the warm expression he was on the receiving end of, he felt comfortable enough to let go.

“Oh no, Yusuke,” Madarame smiled, patting the younger boy’s hand gingerly. “Thank you.”

 

*

 

There was a moment of confusion when Yusuke recognized the direction they were going in, but he shook it off. After all, it _would_ be more private to discuss things at Madarame’s old atelier.

It would just be, perhaps, less comfortable to him because it had been two years since he had lived there.

But that was no matter. Madarame was quiet during the ride as if his public appearance had tired him. It was possible, based on his slouch.

As a result, Yusuke stayed quiet himself. There was no point in wearing his former sensei out any more than their conversation likely would. After all, Madarame did often grow exhausted after being around others for long stretches of time.

Why did he remember this, though?

It was such a long stretch of time since he had had to consider any of this man’s habits, his mannerisms, and yet Yusuke still found himself perfectly recalling details down to the sorts of colors Madarame would wear when he felt certain moods.

Looking at the older man now, Yusuke saw that enigmatic expression again. What had that one meant?

The car slowed to a stop just around the corner from the atelier where Yusuke had grown up. The same place he had been flighted out of what, comparatively, was a short time ago.

It looked as though nothing had changed.

Madarame looked at him almost wistfully. “It has been a while, so I look forward to showing you the changes I have made to the inside.”

Yusuke nodded absently, following him into the familiar building and toeing off his shoes where he had for those many years. “Things are quieter now, Sensei,” Yusuke noted.

“Yes,” Madarame agreed, “it has been a little lonesome since my last student left.”

“Have you stopped accepting apprentices?”

“No, but most everyone left around the same time. I think the last one held on just a couple of months are the four of you left me,” he explained. “After that, everyone seemed eager to leave.”

Yusuke felt guilt well up in his stomach. “I apologize,” he hung his head, “I was… not consulted with at that time.”

“Nonsense. You were just a boy then,” Madarame smiled. “I don’t hold you accountable for the decisions that were made concerning you.” He gestured for Yusuke to follow him, then. “Come now. I want to show you what I’ve done with the old student rooms.”

Along the short trip, Yusuke noticed a substantial amount of blank canvases on easels that appeared to have been already primed. Perhaps Madarame wanted to work on a larger piece but decided to fragment it into several parts?

“This is where the girls used to stay, remember?” Madarame’s voice calling brought Yusuke out of his reverie.

“Ah, yes, Sensei,” he replied, quickly catching up. It was a simple space with a bedroll set up in one corner and a couple of sketchbooks in the other. When Yusuke peered into the room he thought, not for the first time, that it was odd that this room in particular had never had a window to the outdoors.

He remembered the explanation, though: this room faced the wall of another building and, as such, the window would have been looking towards nothing.

At that moment, Yusuke felt a harsh shove into his back that clattered him to the floor in front of him.

The door slammed shut and, with a swift click, the lock was engaged as well.

Blinking dazedly to himself, Yusuke realized that he had, very possibly, entirely misjudged something somewhere along the way.

“Don’t try to break the door down, either, you hear me?” Madarame’s voice screeched through the slightest gap between the floor and the bottom of the door. “There’s no one around to hear you, Yusuke. No one is coming for you.”

But wait —

Yusuke patted at his pockets thoroughly and, with a dawning sense of his own foolishness, realized that he had left his cell phone on the seat of the car during the ride over.

With the loud pattering of footsteps growing successively quieter, Yusuke slumped his shoulders and sighed in defeat. He truly was alone.

 

***

 

“Hey, kid,” Sojiro’s voice called from the bottom of the stairs. “I’m about to close up. Lock the door behind your friends when they leave, okay?”

“I will,” Akira responded, walking over to the upper landing to wave his guardian goodbye. “Thanks for letting them stay late.”

Sojiro cracked something of a smile and waved it off, pulling his apron over his head and walking away instead of replying.

“Have you heard anything from Yusuke yet?” Ann asked once the bells over the door downstairs had rung, announcing Sojiro’s departure.

“Do you think the answer changed in the last five minutes?” Ryuji scoffed. He lay on his back on the couch with his feet hanging off of the back of it.

Ann took the opportunity to smack his exposed stomach.

Akira couldn’t help the smile that grew on his face at Ryuji’s ensuing tempermental antics. Checking his phone once more, he shook his head at Ann. “No, nothing yet.”

“Do you think you should send something to him instead?” Morgana asked, readjusting his position on Akira’s bed.

“Maybe he got caught up in homework or somethin’,” Ryuji suggested. “Tomorrow’s Sunday, after all. Maybe he had something come up. Friends invited him over afterwards and he lost track of time.”

Ann still frowned, her hands coming up to cup her chin. “I just figured he would’ve texted Akira at some point.”

“I could call him,” Akira said. He clicked on Yusuke’s contact, put the phone on speaker for them all, and waited to hear the ringing play back on his end.

“ _I’m sorry, the number you are trying to reach either does not exist or has been disconnected. Goodbye_.”

“Well, so much for that idea,” Ryuji sighed out a laugh. “His phone’s dead.”

“He was our only real lead on Madarame, too,” Morgana grumbled into his folded arms.

Akira was quiet for a moment, fiddling with his phone and pulling up the MetaNav. “Could someone look up Madarame’s full name online?”

“Yeah, why?” Ann asked as she typed out the search.

“If he’s careless enough to send someone to their death, he likely has a Palace, just like we thought.”

“Madarame Ichiryusai,” she said a moment later.

The computerized voice agreed. “One result found.”

“Shit,” Ryuji cursed under his breath. “You think he did something to Yusuke, too?”

“It’s a possibility we should prepare for,” Akira nodded.

“Now we just need a location and his idea of what his Palace would look like,” said Ann. “Do you think it could be the exhibit?”

A moment passed and the MetaNav was silent.

“It probably would be somewhere more permanent,” Morgana suggested. “Somewhere like his home studio or something.”

“But how’re we gonna figure out where the creep lives?” Ryuji huffed, “If Yusuke’s phone’s out of service, and this asshole has a Palace, there’s no way we could just waltz up and get that kind of information.”

“Unless we tail him,” Akira’s expression was almost blank, but his voice revealed his excitement. “Morgana, do you think you could follow him without getting seen?”

Morgana puffed his tiny chest out with pride. “What kind of thief do you take me for?”

Akira smiled. “Of course. Now, Madarame said he would be at his exhibit fairly often. All we have to do is tail him when he leaves.”

“But then we’d have to know when he was coming and going,” Ann cut in, her face lighting up as something dawned on her. “Unless we assume that he’d be there at the same time every day. You know, he probably has a set schedule, right?”

“We can at least start there,” Morgana leaped to his feet. “I won’t let you down!”

Ryuji yawned in response, covering his mouth as his face reddened.

Ann giggled. “I guess we ought to be heading home for tonight, though. We can’t do anything about Yusuke until we can get in touch with him, after all, and we don’t have any more leads about Madarame until we can talk to him.”

Akira led his friends down the stairs and waved them off as they walked back in the direction of the train station.

“Do you think Yusuke is okay?” Morgana asked once it was just the two of them.

As he pulled his pajama shirt over his head, Akira answered, “I hope so.”


	3. May 17th

The first thing Akira did that morning was check his phone. There was nothing unusual about that, he supposed, but if someone had told him that when he was essentially exiled to Tokyo as a result of his assault charge that he would be checking his phone to see if someone whose business he meddled in was doing alright…

Well, he would have called them an idiot. When he got on the train at his quiet country station, his primary goal had been to keep low and not get attached.

Some perseverance he had, there.

After seeing that he hadn’t heard from Yusuke at all overnight, he tried to call and received the same feminine tone telling him that his attempt was unsuccessful.

He looked around the attic room that he and Morgana shared but didn’t see the cat anywhere, either. Even the spot on the foot of the futon that Morgana slept on every night was cool to the touch. That might have been strange for a normal cat, but the slightly cracked open window next to him explained the situation well enough. Morgana had gone out to prowl.

“I guess he couldn’t leave a note, after all,” Akira smiled to himself as he got dressed.

Downstairs, Sojiro was busy going through the motions of opening up the café and washing down the tables again from the night before. “Morning, kid,” he said without looking at Akira. “You got plans for today or anything?”

“Nothing in particular,” he replied, already walking towards the bar where an untouched cup of coffee lay.

“I could always use some help around here, you know.” Sojiro abandoned his extra chore and walked behind the bar. Leaning his elbow on it, he asked, “You kids worried about something?”

Akira glanced up at him, surprised.

“When the blondes showed up yesterday, both of ‘em had sour looks on their faces.” He picked up an empty coffee cup and began wiping it clean with the same rag he’d used on the tables. “And this morning, your sorry mug is just as sad a sight.”

“We met up with a friend at the art exhibit,” Akira explained, “but got separated from him after a bit and couldn’t get in touch with him last night, either.”

Sojiro made a noise with the back of his throat. “I don’t think I ever pegged you as the kind to go to see art, kid.”

“I don’t think I did, either,” Akira smiled.

“It is a shame about your friend, though. You figure something happened to him, then?”

“We’re not sure.”

“Well, if you need to do some looking instead of hang out with this old man,” Sojiro swapped out one cup for another, “you be my guest. Just be back by dark and all.”

“I appreciate it, Boss.”

“No need for all that. Just keep it up with the good behavior, okay?”

Akira stood up from the bar and started to walk back upstairs. “I’ll do my best.”

 

***

 

Things were, expectedly, dark in the room Yusuke had been locked in. While there was a light switch to the one bulb that hung overhead and unadorned, he found it somewhat of a mockery to keep it on during what he believed to be the night hours.

At least there was a bedroll.

Sometime, after a long period of total silence, Yusuke heard the same footsteps approaching as had left him alone. It jostled him from his half-sleeping mind in the middle of a much more pleasant dream.

“Nothing ever leaves me, Yusuke,” Madarame’s voice called, low and grave. “Especially not you. My canvases have never considered wandering off, so why did you think you could get away with it?”

“Is this all you came to say?” For some reason, Yusuke felt like being defiant. He stood to his feet – noticed then that he was disoriented in the total darkness – and stomped over to where he heard the voice coming from.

The sliver of light shining from under the door shifted slightly, like Madarame was moving in place.

“Did you think you were clever, fool? Coming to see me after all that time? Did you think I was some sort of dog that would welcome your return no matter what?”

“I wanted answers,” Yusuke replied, almost whispering. “I wasn’t sure who to believe. I _know_ that there is some good in you,” he felt himself snarl, “but under what circumstances would any good and reasonable person lock someone up like this?”

“You belonged to me.”

Yusuke’s fist slammed against the door. “I don’t belong to anyone! Not you, not Takahashi-san, and not Nakanohara! You all just treat me like a child, like some sort of plaything.” His other hand slid down the wood in front of him, squeaking the whole way.

“Oh, you aren’t one? Then why would you jump from one set of arms to another? Come now, Yusuke,” Madarame laughed. “You and I both know that you’re too weak. When one hand that feeds you upsets you, you simply move on to the next!”

“You’re wrong!” Yusuke ground out in between closed teeth. “You’re all wrong.” He gestured to the corner where the sketchbooks lay, even though the man on the other side of the door couldn’t see. “You’re still in a slump, are you not? You merely capitalized upon an opportunity.”

“And so what if I did?”

“I am not what I can produce,” he felt his knees shaking beneath him, felt his anger building up hotter and hotter, felt his heart beating within him at an erratic rate. What _was_ this? “I am neither my grades nor my art. I will never be someone’s puppet, controlled for whatever purposes they have wrought, pleasing the masses with cheap tricks and masquerades…” His breathing was unsteady for a moment as the quiet of the room built up.

“Are you finished yet?” Madarame pretended to yawn louder than necessary. “If you decide you want to eat, you’ll do as I say.”

A tin of pencils slid under the door with a shove, each one rolling into each other like an echo.

“When one sketchbook is filled up, I might even let you look at _Sayuri_.”

Yusuke fell to the floor with a _thud_. “ _Sayuri_?”

“Oh, just that painting you loved oh so dearly when you were a good, obedient boy.”

“You still have it?” His voice was thin and small as if he had lost something inside of him in that moment.

Madarame slapped at the door a handful of times. “You’ll find out if you do as you’re told, child.”

As the footsteps grew and shrank in volume, Yusuke found himself draping himself against the door in front of him.

What _was_ he to anyone?

 

***

 

>> AKIRA(17:02): Morgana brought news back

>> AKIRA(17:02): He’s not sure if the address is where Yusuke is, or even if Yusuke is in danger,

>> AKIRA(17:03): But he did see Madarame get out of a car at a little shack somewhere just a little outside of Shibuya

<< RYUJI(17:06): Fuckin’ ay, cat! Keep it up!

>> AKIRA(17:07): He wanted me to tell you he’s not a cat

<< ANN(17:07): Well, who cares! We’ve got the address now, right? What do you think, Akira?

<< ANN(17:07): Should we head over and check it out?

>> AKIRA(17:10): Sounds good to me

>> AKIRA(17:11): Meet at the accessway in that same building as yesterday – the one that overlooks downtown Shibuya and the exhibition hall

 

*

 

“You’ll go left at this next turn,” Morgana meowed, instructing the other three Phantom Thieves from his careful perch in Akira’s school bag.

“Is it much further from here?” Ann asked, leaning backward with her hands on the base of her back. A solid _pop_ rang from her back and surprised Ryuji.

“What is up with your spine?” He nearly shouted and stepped away tentatively, just about bumping into Akira.

Morgana scoffed. “We’re nearly there. Honestly, you humans are so lucky to have as long of legs as you do.” He paused for a moment, catching his own slip-up. “I mean, I’m a human, too! I just am stuck in this body, so — “

Akira scratched behind his ear affectionately. “We know, Mona. Thanks for doing the initial legwork.”

A small, defeated purr came from Morgana’s throat. After a few more directions from the cat himself, he wriggled inside of Akira’s bag. “Let me out! It’s that one there, on the corner. I’ll skulk around to see if I can find us a way in.”

“So, what should we do for now, just ring the doorbell?” Ann asked, jabbing her elbow into Ryuji’s side. “Any way for us to not look suspicious while we wait?”

“Try keywords for the MetaNav,” Akira suggested and pulled out his phone. “It’s likely that if this _is_ where Madarame lives, it’s also where his Palace would be located in our world.”

Ryuji threw his hands behind his head and laced his fingers together there. “Good thinking, but what kinda place would some shitheel like this guy think is good enough for him?”

“Kamoshida was the king of his own castle, right?” said Ann. “Maybe this guy is — “

“Guys, quick!” Morgana’s small voice called from around the corner. “One window is open low enough to the ground for you all to fit through.”

“Guess it’ll have to wait,” Ryuji smirked, jogging over to the cat.

Behind the building, a line of windows all sat attached to one wide room. From what Akira could tell, it looked like there was an array of art supplies set up inside. It made enough sense considering who lived here.

The furthest window in that row was cracked just slightly, but like Morgana said, with a little effort it wouldn’t be too tricky to fit any of them through.

“Need a boost?” Ryuji offered Ann, lowering his cupped hands to make a step for her to jump off of.

“Why thank you,” Ann mock curtsied, nearly giggling as she pushed the window up and stepped onto Ryuji’s outstretched hands. With a quick tug, she used the momentum and tumbled through to the other side of the window. “Oof,” she moaned quietly.

“Some thieves we are,” Morgana sighed, hopping off from Akira’s shoulder to the window and down into the room.

Akira at least was tall enough, so he followed suit and landed a little less clumsily than Ann, who had had to squirm down from the window’s ledge while on her stomach.

With Ryuji in the room shortly after, they all spread out and began to observe the bare décor of the famous Madarame’s atelier.

“I’ll go check out things over this way,” Morgana offered. “I saw a window covered with a sheet on this side of the house from the outside. Maybe there’s something good in there.”

“If you get found, too, you only look like a cat.” Ryuji had his hands in his pockets and slumped his shoulders. “Can’t say the same for us.”

“Exactly,” Morgana nodded, “so we should do a quick scope of the house before anything actually happens.”

Akira led the other two down a small hallway with only a couple of doors. One led to a bathroom, another led to an empty room with a closet built into the wall, and the last had a turn lock on the outside.

“That’s strange,” Ann said under her breath. “Why would you need to lock something inside a room, not out?”

“Do we risk it?” Ryuji whispered. “No telling what’s back there, right?”

Someone, or something, on the other side of the door began slamming their fist against the wood.

Ann gasped audibly and stepped backward into Ryuji.

“Madarame, I’ve done what you asked, now let me see _Sayuri_!” Yusuke’s usually melodic voice, muffled by the door, called out in broken fury.

Akira’s hands flew to the lock and undid it, throwing the door open in the same motion. “Yusuke?”

“Akira?” Yusuke asked, entirely confused. In one hand, he held a pencil that looked like its point had been sharpened at the expense of someone’s fingernails.

Upon inspection, Akira could tell that the taller boy in front of him looked just as bewildered as his voice had sounded (and even angrier than that, if it was possible).

“It’s a long story, but we found this address and now we’re here,” Akira explained, gesturing for Yusuke to step out of the room.

While the blue-haired boy did so, he still clutched tightly to his makeshift weapon, his broken nails turning white from the pressure. “For what purpose, exactly, did you decide this was wise?”

“Your phone, man!” Ryuji complained. “Your number’s out of commission, so we figured something bad happened.”

Morgana strode up to the four of them and cleared his throat to get their attention. “You all should come check this out.”

Yusuke’s eyes flew to the cat and then back to Akira. “You brought the cat along with you?”

“He likes to tag along,” Akira shrugged, following Morgana’s lead. “I think he found something, too.”

At the other end of the hall, where the room Morgana had suspected something of lay, was a door swinging freely from its hinges.

“There’s a fan inside, must be creating a current,” Morgana suggested. “Inside is crazy, though!”

“Those – those are all…” Yusuke’s voice was trembling, much like his legs, and he fell to his knees.

“The same painting?” Ann asked, quirking her head. “Reprints or something, right?”

Yusuke dropped the pencil in his hand and crawled his way over to the rack of artwork that held several dozen copies of the same piece.

While Akira had no idea about art, it was obvious that the work was beautiful. A woman was depicted in one corner and, in the background, a _sakura_ tree facing the other way was just beginning to bloom. The bottom of the painting was obscured in a mist, however, and looked like it had been left unfinished.

What was most captivating about it was the expression on the woman’s face, so full of longing and something like sadness.

Yusuke was crying, his voice shifting octaves as he spoke. He almost sounded like a mad man; his eyes were wild and he reached for his hair, pulling at it so hard it had to have hurt.

“Even stealing from the worth of _Sayuri_ by making multiple copies? To what end, Madarame? Was taking others’ ideas simply not enough for you? Was art just a _joke_ , some sort of game to be won?”

“Woah, Akira, I think something bad’s happening,” Morgana meowled in surprise. “This much negative energy could mean a Palace is erupting right in front of us!”

“A Palace?” Ann gasped, putting her hand to her mouth.

“Yusuke,” Akira spoke evenly, reaching out a hand to help the taller boy stand. “We should get you out of here before Madarame comes back.” He turned to face Ryuji and said, “Take pictures of the art as evidence while we get his stuff together, okay?”

Ryuji flashed a thumbs up and pulled out his phone, already snapping pictures by the time Yusuke was on his feet again.

“Is there anything you need from here?” Akira asked Yusuke as he held tenuously onto the other boy’s arm to steady him.

He was still wobbly, still in a funk from what he had seen. It radiated off of him in waves that Akira thought even _he_ could feel.

“My phone,” Yusuke replied weakly, his gaze distant and glazed over.

It was like when he had been in Madarame’s arms the day before, Akira realized. Was something about that man awful enough that he could cause others to create Palaces of their own?

Or, was it possible that his influence over Yusuke was that strong?

Either way, Akira tightened his grip on Yusuke’s arm and wrapped his other arm around Yusuke’s back in something of a protective hold. He may not have known the other boy very well, but it was obvious that something terrible had happened between Yusuke and the famous artist.

Something that he could help put an end to.

Morgana pawed at Akira’s leg a moment later with a phone held gingerly in his mouth.

“Is this it?” Akira asked Yusuke, leaning over to grab the phone from Morgana.

“Yes,” he replied quietly, reaching out for it with a shaking hand. “The case on it is correct.”

“Nothing else, right?”

Yusuke shook his head.

“Good, now let’s get you out of here.”

Ann held the front door open for both boys to fit through; they reasoned that if Madarame came in and saw Yusuke gone in the first place, it wasn’t that much of a stretch to leave the door unlocked behind them.

“The station is only a couple blocks from here,” Ryuji looked over at Yusuke. “You think you can make it?”

Shaking off Akira’s hold on him, as if he just realized it was there, Yusuke nodded fiercely. “Don’t think of pitying me. I am the same age as all of you.”

“We’re not,” Ann reassured him, gesturing placatingly. “You’ve just been through a lot, it seems.”

“That means nothing for my competency,” Yusuke huffed.

Hands returned to his pockets, Akira sighed. “Relying on others isn’t a bad thing, Yusuke.”

“It leads to co-dependence,” he replied, pointing in Akira’s face. “I won’t be taken in by whatever you’re trying to do here. I appreciate the rescue mission, as it were, but I am by no means a bachelor in a bind here.”

Ryuji glanced at Ann, mouthed, ‘bachelor in a bind?’, and she shrugged in return.

Akira took hold of Yusuke’s wrist and lowered it below his own field of vision. “None of us would ever call you that, either.” He paused, breathed in deeply, and looked back up at the other boy. “We haven’t had the best home lives. When Madarame and you looked happy together, we hoped that was the case. Because we didn’t hear anything from you last night, we overstepped our boundaries. That was inappropriate of us.”

Yusuke’s expression twisted, and he frowned. “But — “

Akira held up a hand. “Just one more thing. We would do it again if we knew it could help.”

“My apologies,” Yusuke looked away definitively, acted as though he was dusting himself off, and began walking in the direction of the Shibuya station. “In the future, allow me to take care of myself, however.”

Akira sighed, defeated. “Of course.”

 

***

 

Yusuke could tell he was tiptoeing around the truth with Nakanohara and Takahashi-san, but something in him decidedly did not care. When they had asked him where he had been the previous night and why he had neglected to call, he simply replied,

“Am I not allowed to stay over at a friend’s house?”

They shut up their mouths tightly, their lips pursing and their eyebrows furrowing in frustration, but there was nothing to really be said to that. Beyond his studies or his talents, Takahashi-san in particular had stressed how much she wanted for him to make friends with his classmates. If he was accomplishing that goal they had set out for him, why would they punish him for it?

“I do feel rather guilty over your being unable to reach me, however,” he added as an extra countermeasure. “None of the others I was with had the same model phone as me.”

“Well, you’re home now,” Takahashi-san had smiled weakly, her eyes glassing over with unshed tears. Her lips were quivering lightly and it took all of Yusuke’s resolve not to perform some sort of expected affectionate physical response to calm her down.

They weren’t all right about Madarame, after all. Just _mostly_. That memory he had held onto about his mentor’s praise of his first piece of artwork as a child was still intact, even with the confusing veil of age and replaying the image in his mind until it had clouded over.

Besides that, he had an assignment to finish up.

Nakanohara had ruffled his hair lightly like he did when Yusuke was much shorter than him, telling him to go and work on his homework, and the action that had brought him so much joy when he was younger now only seemed to stoke some invisible fire that was churning itself alive inside of Yusuke.

Everything seemed bathed in it.

 

***

 

“Kitagawa Yusuke,” Akira asked the MetaNav.

“One result found.”

“Art gallery, exhibit, show room, studio,” he counted off on his fingers.

The phone didn’t respond.

He slammed his head into his hands. “Dammit,” he said under his breath.

“We’ve been racking our brains over this for a while, Akira,” Morgana mewled. “We’d have to be at the right location, too.”

“I – I can’t leave him like that, Morgana.”

Something wicked shown in Morgana’s eyes. “Because you think he’s cute?” His tail rose and flopped back down in a wave.

“That has nothing to do with it, either,” Akira barked, his face dusted with a faint pink hue. “It seemed like he got taken in by his mentor.” He stood up from his seat at the desk where he had already given up on trying to make lockpicks for the night.

Akira continued. “He might have been trying to make amends between the two of them. Madarame said something about them not seeing each other for a while, and when Yusuke actually saw Madarame, he ran straight to the guy.”

“It’s almost like a kid excited to see their parent,” Morgana added.

“Exactly. Except,” he ruffled his fingers through his hair and stared up at the blank wooden ceiling above him. “He hated it when we helped him. So that means he’s feeling stuck like I did back home. Like I did when that girl was getting harassed and I stepped in, acting before I could think.”

He shook his head. “It was excruciating in the moments before, Morgana. Should I help her, or look the other way? Should I follow my gut, or save my own skin?” Akira shut his eyes tight. “Either way, I was screwed. I’d either be complicit in someone getting assaulted or I’d be in trouble in the eyes of the law since it wasn’t my fight to pick.”

Morgana adjusted his position so he could groom his front paws. “But you jumped in anyway, _Joker_ , and even if that lady still testified against you, she probably is grateful for what you did.”

“I didn’t do it so she could be happy,” Akira sighed and slumped down onto the futon. “I did it so that voice in the back of my head would shut up – so I wouldn’t have to keep wondering if I did the right thing or not.”

A high-pitched, half-purring chuckle rumbled through Morgana’s chest. “Sometimes, thieves are stealing so they can give back to those who needed it more.” He cocked his head sideways and smiled. “Getting in someone’s way to help them isn’t a bad thing.”

“So we should keep trying with Yusuke,” Akira sighed, giving Morgana the barest hint of a smile. “To shut up our consciences that would bother us if we didn’t.”

Stretching his back and arching his rear, Morgana yawned. “Something like that, anyway.” He pounced over to the futon and turned in a circle a couple of times before settling down. “Have you tried ‘stage’ for the MetaNav? Some artists perform in front of others, and since you mentioned feeling stuck, all I can think of is a marionette.”

“No harm in trying it.” Akira re-opened the app and repeated the word; in a flash, the whole app lit up with a glowing light. His face bathed in the shadow of it, he grinned with his whole face at Morgana. “Perfect.”


	4. May 18th

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Quick CW for this chapter: during one of the scenes from Yusuke's perspective, there's a "blink and you'll miss it" mention of vomiting. In the same vein, during an Akira perspective, there is an implication of suicidal ideation. Again, it's fast, but I wanted you all to know in case that's an issue for you. 
> 
> To everyone who can, enjoy!

When he went to shower that morning, Yusuke discovered how badly his nails really had been damaged in his attempts to sharpen one of the pencils Madarame supplied him with into a point that could pierce the skin. The pain of it all apparently had been blanketed by the seething heat of his anger.

As he washed off the sweat and frustration from having been locked in a room alone like some punished little whelp, all he could feel was every little pinprick of water that dared to land in between his cracked skin and too-short nails. He flexed his fingers experimentally, trying to suss out the damage that had been done to his hands as a whole.

Nothing a little extra care couldn’t work out seeing as he could still hold a pencil or a brush. The finer detail work of adding complex patterns or anything requiring his fingertips to all work in perfect unison would have to wait, however.

He walked out of the door to the apartment, before anyone else woke up, his hair still dripping.

 

*

 

For his performing arts class, he had been assigned to look into the history of one particular form or component of a performing art that interested him. Some of the other students had inquired into the ways that drama developed around the world, others into how costuming for performance had become such a facet of the work itself, and others still spoke of the intricacies in set design and how it aided in telling the story the actors put on.

Yusuke, on the other hand, had researched the Japanese style of puppetry known as _bunraku_ _because he had seen a show put on in that style once_. When called up to the front of the classroom to give his presentation, he said this:

“The art itself developed around the same time the musical instrument featured in it, the _samisen_ , began to grow in popularity. In the background of the plays put on by the _bunraku_ actors, there would be several people tasked with chanting out the story itself as it unfolded. Unlike _kabuki_ theater or _noh_ , _bunraku_ fused music, theatrical storytelling, and puppetry. Around the height of its popularity, the puppeteers controlling the puppets realized the extent of the delicacy that was required to truly make their creations come alive.”

“As a result, the puppets from then on were handled by three people at once. To be the puppeteer in charge of the head required decades of dedication to the craft and quite a lot of work on much more minor characters. Before this, the puppeteers would control the legs or arms. In this way, because of the sheer number of crew members working in tandem to bring their craft to life, it was said that _bunraku_ could create a puppet that expressed more emotions than even a human being.”

“Unfortunately, attempting to put fifty or more puppets on the stage at once, as was customary, would require more than one hundred actors and prove to be difficult nowadays, where the art has fallen into the familiar hardship many art forms face today: funding.”

The other students clapped politely – a couple yawning intermittently – and Yusuke took his seat.

“Thank you, Kitagawa-san,” his performing arts teacher said, smiling brightly and clapping along with the class. “That was a lovely presentation. Who would like to go next?”

 

*

 

Back in the workshop after being dismissed from his final class, Yusuke pulled out his phone to see several texts from Akira. He considered simply ignoring the notification icon on the app, but he knew it would be easier to read the messages _and_ _then_ leave the other boy hanging.

<< AKIRA(15:49): I know yesterday ended on bad terms

<< AKIRA(15:49): I intentionally ignored your privacy and stepped into a situation that wasn’t mine to interfere in

<< AKIRA(15:49): It was entirely my fault that we all showed up at Madarame’s house – please don’t blame Ryuji and Ann

<< AKIRA(15:50): If there is some way I can make it up to you, I would love to

<< AKIRA(15:50): We could meet up somewhere after school and I could try to win you a Jack Frost plush like you have on your phone case

<< AKIRA(15:52): I’m sure there’s a rigged claw machine somewhere in town that has one

<< AKIRA(15:55): I could even bring Morgana ฅ^•ﻌ•^ฅ

Yusuke, perhaps in spite of himself, laughed at the increased desperation in the messages (and the cat icon that Akira had sent in his last message). He glanced up at his charcoal piece, considered that the deadline was still weeks away, and decided to respond after all.

>> YUSUKE(16:38): I am still on my school campus, however, I would be amenable to seeing you this afternoon.

Almost immediately, as Yusuke was still typing another reply, he received Akira’s next message.

<< AKIRA(16:39): (ﾉ◕ヮ◕)ﾉ*:・ﾟ✧

<< AKIRA(16:39): What stop was Kosei at, again?

 

***

 

“Our schools are actually fairly close to each other,” Akira panted, his torso crumpled into his legs and hands pressed into his thighs for stability. “It’s all the side streets that you can take from the station to Kosei that took so long.”

Yusuke looked absently at his phone as he slung his school bag over his shoulder with his other hand. “It was only fifteen minutes,” he noted.

Akira gave him some semblance of a smile and adjusted his glasses. “Either way, I’m here. Where do you want to go now?”

The two boys stood next to one of the pristine brick buildings on Kosei’s campus. As far as Akira could tell, the entire school had unified its appearance with the white-washed façade of the bricks that lined every building.

It was impressive from the outside, to be sure.

Behind the school gate’s ornate metal worked filigree, in one of the adjoining bushes that sat at least hip-height, Ryuji and Ann knelt with their phones in their hands and Morgana safely perching out of Akira’s school bag that Ann had brought with her.

“You ready?” the cat asked the two blondes, looking between them.

“As we’ll ever be,” Ann nodded, making a fist with her free hand.

“Kitagawa Yusuke,” Ryuji whispered into the microphone of his device in place of an answer.

The app agreed with him, responding in a muffled tone thanks to Ryuji covering the mic in between his own speech.

“And a stage,” Morgana finished, his whiskers twitching as he smirked.

The glowing white light from the app flashed over them, enveloping them all in the soft shine of the transformations they underwent when entering a Palace.

 

*

 

When the three of them found themselves landing on the ground outside of a large auditorium hall, they did not expect to see Joker and a bewildered Yusuke standing beside him.

“Ahh, fuck,” Skull moaned, swinging his arms up and behind his head. “What do we do now?”

Joker yanked off his mask in one motion, cried out, “Mandrake, come!” and the pink plant-like creature appeared before him, floating in the air and waiting for a command. “Pulinpa,” he shouted and pointed at Yusuke.

The mandrake winked flirtatiously and the look on Yusuke’s face grew even more confused. He fell directly on his rear as if his legs were kicked out from under him and his gaze wandered aimlessly like he couldn’t tell up from down.

“That’ll work for now,” Mona nodded in approval. “Someone carry him inside so we can drop him off in a safe room.”

“Got it,” Skull gave a thumbs-up and pulled Yusuke’s torso onto and over his own, holding the taller boy by his waist. “We’ll need to tread lightly if we’re gonna be hauling him around for a while.”

“I didn’t know anyone could go into their own Palace,” Panther whispered as they entered into the main foyer in the auditorium hall.

“So long as his physical form and his shadow don’t meet, everything should be fine,” Mona explained. “There could be some issues with confronting who you really are.”

“Be on the lookout for anything suspicious as always,” Joker suggested. “Palaces are entirely different from each other, so nothing is guaranteed.”

“Right!” Skull and Panther agreed.

The room they stood in was almost entirely empty save for an elaborately decorated marble table. When Joker walked up to it, carefully at first in case it was a trap, he noticed that the majority of the decorations that littered its surface appeared to be programs for a show.

“What’re those?” Skull squinted and leaned in. “The map to the place or something?”

“No,” Joker shook his head. He flipped through the pages of the program and found it to be crammed full of details: who the players in today’s performance were, what roles they would be playing, summaries of the acts, and a several-page dedication section that thanked everyone who had contributed monetarily to the day’s show. “I think it really _is_ a program.”

“That doesn’t make much sense,” Panther replied, picking up another for herself. “And who are these people? Yusuke isn’t even listed among the actors.”

“I thought he painted, anyway,” Mona said, jumping up onto the table with his paws’ help.

Joker heard the doors behind them open and, before he could tell everyone to duck under the rounded marble table in front of them, a crowd of shadows all rushed in.

“They all look… like people.” Panther sounded increasingly confused. “I mean, all of their faces are blanked out, but it’s obvious that they’re still people. Kamoshida had victims he knew, does this mean Yusuke doesn’t know who he’s hurting?”

“We’ll have to pull their masks off if they want a fight,” Joker shrugged as he pulled out his knives. “It doesn’t matter what they look like now.”

But rather than attack, the shadows all milled through the foyer in a beeline to somewhere else. When the thieves tried to follow their footsteps, Joker noticed that two sets of double doors sat attended by larger, more muscular shadows taking tickets.

“Everyone, please form orderly lines so we can process you all through as quickly as possible,” one shadow wearing a red vest shouted. He held one of the programs in his hand and had curved it to look like a megaphone. “Again, every seat is a good seat. Please form orderly lines!”

“What the hell kinda Palace is this?” Skull laughed. “Kamoshida’s was a castle with some half-naked king, and now this is just a theater for some play?”

“It _is_ hard to say what exactly is twisted in Yusuke’s thinking,” Mona tapped his paw to his chin.

“Ah, you there!” The shadow with the vest pointed over to the group of the thieves. “The box office is still open if you’re looking for tickets.” He pointed his now cylindrical program over to his left.

“Thank you?” Panther waved, her voice unsteady.

Another shadow approached them from the side and tapped Skull on the shoulder. “If you could hand over the prop, sir, we need it for the show.” It gestured to Yusuke who, slumped over Skull’s back, could have been mistaken for a life-sized puppet.

“There’s been some mistake,” Joker placated, his arm extending in front of Skull. “This isn’t a prop.”

“Of course it is,” the shadow laughed, albeit a little croak of a laugh. With one meaty, entirely dark hand, it reached for Yusuke’s body and held him up by the underarms.

In the shadow’s grasp, Joker did have to admit that the blue-haired boy looked decidedly wooden. Even his clothes morphed before their eyes, changing from a non-regulation school uniform to a _yukata_ that nearly dragged the floor. The color matched Yusuke’s hair; it featured a gentle wave that almost hypnotized Joker when he looked at it.

…Had Yusuke always been that handsome?

Unfortunately, the shadow began to march off into the auditorium without another word. By the time Joker reached out his gloved hand to try and make any sort of contact with the shadow, he was already too late.

“What happened there, Mona?” Panther asked, glancing down at the mascot-looking cat.

“I’m not sure myself,” he explained. “But if we want to get Yusuke back and to destroy this place, we might have to watch the show.”

“It’s a good way to blend in at first,” Joker nodded. “Come on.” His wave that gestured them to follow him was grandiose, certainly over the top, and he felt some of that ridiculous fighting spirit return to him. Pausing to think about whether someone looked good when they were inside a manifestation of that person’s distorted selves was, at the very least, odd.

The shadow at the box office was a tiny thing. It looked older, almost feminine, and had impossibly long, thin fingers erupting from its comparatively too-small hands. If the shadows taking tickets were bodyguards ensuring that no one entered who wasn’t allowed, this one was a geriatric woman who would talk your ear off at a supermarket.

“We don’t have time for this,” Skull groaned, swinging his club from the ground to up on his shoulder. “Lady,” he called, knocking at the short dividing table outside of the little alcove the shadow sat in. “Lady, we need tickets.”

“How can I help you?” The shadow floated over, somehow creaking as it did, and placed its terrible, wrinkled, inky nothingness of fingers onto the ledge that Skull was leaning on.

He instantly stood up straight and screwed up his face in disgust. “Yeah, I’m done waiting around.” His smile was all teeth and bravado as he vaulted over the barrier separating him from the shadow.

As he jumped onto it, it faded into smoke and reappeared as a beautiful woman in high heels with wings.

“Succubus,” Joker called out, aiming his rifle at the transformed shadow. “Everyone, surround it!”

The others leaped over the same barrier, one by one, and after just enough time for Skull and Joker to have shot a couple of rounds into the flying beastie, it was enveloped by the four intimidating thieves.

Skull gave Joker a knowing glance and, cocking his head to the side, asked, “Any last words?”

They all pounced in tandem, seemingly knowing exactly where their limbs ended and the others’ began all at once. Before he could truly satisfy that little voice in his mind begging him to _destroy it_ , Joker held up the signal that the shadow had had enough.

It burst into a column of smoke and, with a quick turn, the four of them began rooting around the room the shadow had occupied.

“Anything that looks like it could be a ticket,” Mona said, trying to pull his head out of a deep desk drawer, “is fair game. We might need four of them, anyway.”

“Hopefully not,” Panther sighed as she yanked at a filing cabinet and broke the lock on it. “All I see is paper scraps.” She pulled one out and held it to the light. “It looks like someone’s drawn on it,” she puzzled.

“Remember, we’re in Yusuke’s Palace,” Joker replied. “It’s entirely possible that it _has_ been drawn on.” He paused. “Something an artist would value, huh?” He asked no one in particular.

Skull still leaned in to see if he noticed anything about where Joker was looking. “What’d ya find?”

“I think Panther found exactly what we needed,” Joker answered cryptically. “We’re not here for a real play, we’re here to steal treasure. If Yusuke thinks something is worth having, that could be a ticket.”

“Basically, if it has value to him, it’s valuable here,” Mona grinned. “Good thinking, Joker!”

In the same way they entered the box office’s back room, they left. After they had hopped the thin table there, each of them divvied up the sketches between the four of them and got in line.

As they neared the front of the queue, Panther tapped Joker’s shoulder and whispered, “Do you really think this is enough? Shiho used to draw in middle school and when she had thrown out a sketch,” she drew a line across her throat with her finger. “No good.”

“We can always try again,” Joker frowned slightly, “but we should at least try what we have.”

The brawny shadow in the vest bent down to meet Mona at eye-level. “Ticket, please,” it asked and extended its hand.

Mona straightened out the wadded-up piece of paper and handed it over to the shadow.

It gestured him over towards a seat, somewhere towards stage right.

Panther and Skull cheered at their success.

“Ticket please,” the shadow repeated to Skull.

“I’ve got one right here,” Skull puffed out his chest and proudly displayed his equally rough looking sketch.

“Ah, I’m afraid that’s not going to cut it,” the shadow tsked. 

“What?” Skull leaned into the shadow’s chest and pulled a fistful of vest into his hand. “What do you mean that’s not good enough?”

“I’m afraid all tickets have to be unique to enter,” the shadow explained, unhooking himself from Skull’s grasp. “Company policy.”

Panther and Joker exchanged meaningful glances.

“I hope you _really_ like this guy,” Panther muttered under her breath as they plodded over back to the box office.

 

***

 

A bright flash of light – like someone opened up the ceiling inside of a gymnasium while it was dark – and suddenly Yusuke had been transported to some foreign place. The people around him seemed vaguely familiar, especially the handsome gentleman-looking boy wearing a black waistcoat and a masquerade mask, but he couldn’t place where he had seen the cat mascot that only came up to his waist.

“Fuckin’ hell,” one of the other figures moaned, flapping his arms around like a child despite his face being covered in a skull mask.

In fact, all of these people were masked. Yusuke put his hands up to his own face to feel around for one, but there was nothing there.

Another pop of light, and a bizarre creature that looked like a red lily with sprouted pink and green limbs appeared. The masked gentleman’s face was bloody, and he was scowling as he shouted something, but Yusuke still thought he recognized him.

Then, just as the name formed in his mind, his entire field of vision decided to send his mind feedback so quickly he thought he might vomit. Every single movement anyone else made around him – and any time his own body entered into his field of view – it was as if they were moving in stop motion and each individual frame had to be cataloged into his brain.

As a result, he simply closed his eyes and let himself hit the ground. When Takahashi-san had particularly bad moments of anxiety, she said the coolness of the ground would relax her.

However, his entire world jostled even at the _thought_ of one of his roommates. Even with his eyes screwed shut, his head rattled around, and his equilibrium flipped entirely. He began to feel as though he were being dragged along by a horse and was about to be executed like some of the historical figures he had learned about in his Western-oriented history classes.

In time, the jostling ceased, and he felt cradled like a child in the arms of some being with entirely cloud-like limbs. When he rested his head against the approximate chest of this creature, Yusuke could feel his subconscious take over as he fell asleep.

His clothes did seem different, though, he noticed in the middle of a yawn.

No matter.

 

***

 

Joker squeezed into one of the last seats on the row. Numbly, he registered that his companions had been directed to sit in almost opposite ends of the auditorium from him, but when Panther had tried to ask a shadow about swapping seats so she and Mona could sit together, the shadow attacked.

It simply wasn’t worth the hassle, they decided, and so Joker had taken point at the closest open chair to the stage.

Everything grew dark as if the show was about to begin and, not for the first time, he wondered where Yusuke had been taken off to. In all likelihood, the next time they entered the Palace they should make it a point to see where exactly his shadow-self lived.

Maybe they could pretend to be actors themselves? It was possible that Mona could pull it off, but he almost chuckled to himself imagining Panther and Skull attempting to fit in with the perfect shadow actors and actresses.

If someone’s heart wasn’t on the line, he might have wanted to see it.

A single stage light pointed at center stage and a handful of shadows appeared, most of them enrobed in the same inky substance that masked any regular shadow’s true form. Theirs, on the other hand, seemed to billow out like proper Japanese formalwear.

The beginnings of a smile played out on Joker’s face. Yusuke really was a dramatic at heart.

Music began playing, the twanging sound of a traditional _samisen_ ringing out through the audience, and someone began announcing the players onstage. Another, albeit dimmer, light shone on them as well.

“Takahashi Kanna,” the shadow’s voice called, and one of the shadow actors grew into a woman around Panther’s height with dark hair and an almost mockingly-kind expression. The now female-presenting shadow waved mildly.

“Nakanohara Natsuhiko,” the same voice spoke, and other shadow actor took the form of the man the Phantom Thieves had dealt with in Mementos just a few days prior to meeting Yusuke. This shadow bowed at the waist and righted himself before the voice continued.

Joker mused, connecting the dots only now _,_ _that Yusuke was_ _the little brother that Nakanohara mentioned on the Phan site._

“And, now proudly presenting our most esteemed player,” the shadow boomed above the music even as it reached its crescendo, “Madarame Ichiryusai!”

The shadow seemed to gurgle a bit when it took Madarame’s form, as if even it knew of the historied past between the two men. When it finally revealed Madarame’s shape, the famous artist looked a little younger than Joker remembered him. It was as if the shadows could only accept this idealized version of the man.

When this shadow acted as Madarame, however, it was over the top. The older man winked overtly at the audience, the front row in particular, and one shadow from that section attempted to touch Madarame’s shadow-hands. Rather than pull back or reject the shadow’s advances, Madarame rubbed the head of the shadow vying for his affections and chuckled to himself when it appeared to swoon.

Certainly, Yusuke had strong opinions regarding this man.

Order returned to the stage momentarily, and the announcing shadow took back the attention of the crowd. “Now, for our star performer,” the shadow spoke, and a hush fell over the audience as they anxiously awaited his appearance. “Kitagawa Yusuke!”

The blue-haired boy – the one Joker’s proximity to had accidentally dragged into the Palace – was entirely devoid of facial expression when he was brought onto the stage. The three other announced players had had to retrieve him from behind the curtains. When they made him wave and bow to the crowd before them, the female shadow was controlling his hands, the man from Mementos was moving his feet, and Madarame himself was half-hidden behind Yusuke’s body, tugging at some unseen mechanism that made his head and neck move around as if Yusuke were doing it all himself.

Joker stood to his feet without thinking and reached for one of his knives, but he was pulled back into his seat by the waistcoat.

Another shadow from behind him looked peeved, shushing him and muttering something about maintaining the integrity of the art piece.

Strangely enough, the other two shadows on stage were given puppets as well, but theirs were much less elaborate and much smaller. Those puppets _also_ took on the forms of the man and woman who were controlling Yusuke, but their features seemed much more exaggerated as if they were to convey something with less obvious effort.

It was mesmerizing, Joker had to admit, but it was also sick to watch.

As the play moved along and the narrator spoke in time to the music, the whole thing seemed to only grow out of proportion. The backdrop of the scene was fairly simple in comparison to the tension and the drama that the rhythm of the narrator imbued into the action.

A pale blue sky with a barren tree took up the majority of the canvas’s real estate. Below there, only mist and the barest hints of the tree limbs were given any detail. Something about it wouldn’t let go of Akira, wouldn’t allow him to forget it.

Was it hand painted, and the implication was that Yusuke made it?

His mind disagreed with him, wanted more out of him.

But he couldn’t put his finger on it, not with the growing volume of the music and the speaker’s shouts escalating to match and _had the actors at some point acquired swords_ — ?

Joker clutched onto the armrests on his seat, his focus screaming at him to pay attention to the actors, not the backdrop!

The audience was going wild around him, moving in their own tempo like a wave, and it felt as though he were being swallowed up by the darkness of the theater and the noise. Surely, this wasn’t how the traditional art was performed, right?

Squealing with glee, the shadows clapped in a harried frenzy; it was enough to dizzy him beyond belief.

“The artist, then, places his well-worn sandals to his side and draws his long ceremonial blade —”  the narrating shadow continued, finally distinguishable from the crowd’s fever.

After he had done it, Joker would have said that it was the shine of the _odachi_ blade nearing Yusuke’s stomach that sprang him into action. In reality, it was the pleading look in the eyes of the ornately dressed boy, otherwise entirely wooden and moved by someone else’s own hand, that had made him shoot his pistol at the Takahashi-san shadow.

Yusuke had looked so _young_ in that moment.

So fragile.

So entirely like Joker had felt in the seconds leading up to his shoving the bald-headed man out of that woman’s way that dark night.

The stage lights swept all at once to focus on Joker and the heat – quite literally – was on him.

He found himself leaping from shadow to shadow, using whatever semi-solid body part he could as a foothold, to rush the stage. The crack of a whip buzzed through the air behind him; it mixed with the absolute _zap_ of electricity that spiked down as the air pressure around Joker changed.

Not to mention the tiny air currents beneath his feet that helped lift him higher when needed.

In his dogged pursuit of the players still wrestling with the _odachi_ in their puppet’s hands, he was entirely supported by his teammates.

His footfalls stopped as he flung himself into a backwards somersault through the air, using one shadow’s mask and another’s head as his jumping off point. The heat that he felt at his back only a moment later testified to the continual aid that would be thrown his way.

The smaller shadows that had been piloting Yusuke’s left arm and legs abandoned their post and, the two of them clutching the longsword in their shared grasp, attempted to run Joker through.

Instead, he hopped back a couple of steps, casting his mask aside again and yelling, “Arsene, come!” into the craze of the brawl. Within the last moments before the shadows reached him, he grinned wickedly, all lips and teeth and the slide of tongue over open mouth, and he pointed directly in the line of their aim.

“Eiga,” he roared, his entire being shining with the dark flame that poured forth from his red, heel-wearing demonic persona. Pure crimson and ebony _screamed_ into the limbs of the shadows, melting both them and their weapon into nothing.

After all, what was a puppeteer to the man writing the script?

His own thick-heeled boots clacked into the wooden floor of the stage, the cast his persona produced eating up anything that dared to enter its path. When he stood face-to-face with the shadow impersonating Madarame, Joker’s voice dropped an octave. “Let him go.”

The shadow’s eyes sparkled yellow, the glint reflecting back at him like the most wicked creature of the night, and it cast Yusuke to the side to reveal its true form.

His teammates, on the other hand, had no need to see what the creature really looked like. A gale slammed into the inky being and, as it toppled to the ground, Joker noticed it was writhing with the paralysis only Skull’s lightning could have offered.

He couldn’t have gotten luckier with his partners if he tried.

Mona and Panther had already run up onto the stage and left Skull to bash in a few more enemies, their focus devoted to the _well-dressed_ boy who lay crumpled in a heap on the floor in front of them.

Both healers’ persona were out within a second and, before Joker even gave the suggestion, the green and sparkling light of simultaneous Dia had been shot into Yusuke’s wan face and chest.

“How’s he lookin’?” Skull asked, tromping up the stairs of the stage as though he couldn’t simply haul himself over the edge of it. He rolled his shoulder a couple of times, experimentally, and leaned towards the two kneeling thieves to look at Yusuke.

“He’ll be fine,” Panther reassured him, glancing back at Joker. “You can come and see him,” she almost giggled.

Joker took a couple of steps forward as if he had to approach his new friend like someone would a wounded animal. He might have been overly cautious, but… “Do I need to summon Pixie?”

Mona quirked an eyebrow. “What, for another healing spell?”

In response, Joker looked decidedly in another direction. He was feeling less like a thief who took whatever he wanted to matter the cost and, well, more like a high school student who almost saw someone’s cognitions of several people stab the one who had thought them up in the first place.

 _Tired_ , essentially.

“I think he’ll be good as new after some rest.” Panther stood and placed a hand on Joker’s shoulder. “Come on, leader, what’s next?”

Turning, he surveyed the destruction they had wrought on the auditorium itself, much less the stage or the audience.

“Let’s check out what’s backstage,” he offered. “It could be a safe room. If it is, let’s head out. If it’s not,” he smirked and helped Skull carry Yusuke by slinging one of the boy’s arms around both of their shoulders. “Let’s head out.”

 

***

 

Yusuke blinked dazedly, as if seeing sunlight for the first time. When his eyes adjusted, he noticed that it was later on in the evening, that he was not on the Kosei campus, and that his head had been propped up on the thighs of one Kurusu Akira.

His entire sense of self melted, all burned in the fierce heat that shot itself up his neck and into his face.

(Elsewhere too, if he considered the plush quality of the thighs he was resting on…)

“Good morning, sleeping beauty,” Akira joked.

Yusuke took some modicum of comfort in noticing that the same tinges of redness were mirrored on Akira’s own face.

When the dark-haired boy pulled him into a sitting position, Yusuke put his hand to his head. “I feel entirely exhausted,” he complained. “What happened?”

Akira looked at him with a weak smile, eyebrows scrunched together and glasses drooped down his nose. He held up a forearm-length Jack Frost stuffed toy and grimaced a little more.

“I offered to win him for you, but you insisted that it wasn’t victory if you hadn’t tasted it for yourself.” His smile grew a little. “Or something. I gave you some tokens to play with, went to check out another claw machine to see if there was a better chance of getting a doll from there, and when I walked back over to you, you had slammed your head into the machine in frustration.”

Ah, so he was in the arcade. He thought the flashing lights in the dark seemed familiar.

 _That was_ not _the point_!

Truly, Yusuke would perish on the spot if he had any control over it. Flinging his head into his hands as he propelled himself upward, he did notice how dizzy he felt. “I cannot accept this.”

“What?” Akira asked, angling his torso so that he could almost look Yusuke in the eye from his sulking position. “The stuffed animal, or your reaction?”

“Either,” Yusuke huffed. “Both.”

“But he was in the prize slot in the claw catcher when I came back, Yusuke,” Akira winked. “You won him fair and square.”

“Pity will get you nowhere,” Yusuke groaned, snatching the Jack Frost from Akira’s grasp. He held it tightly to his chest and worked up some shred of dignity he had left in him. “Thank you.”

“Of course.” Akira glanced at his phone and checked the time. “It’s getting late,” he said, offering Yusuke his hand. “We should probably head home.”

Yusuke’s grimace returned. “I may have,” he cleared his throat, still holding the Jack Frost close to him, “upset my, err,” he paused again. “Roommates. With my actions the other day.” He looked Akira square in the face, somehow his own expression blank. “I may need to stay the night elsewhere.”

Akira blinked once, twice, three times. “Are you sure that this isn’t relying on others?”

The flush returned full-force to Yusuke’s face. “I — ”  he stuttered.

“I’m kidding, Yusuke,” Akira replied. “I’ll need to text my guardian to make sure it’s okay since it’s a school night, but there shouldn’t be a problem.” He began walking towards the door to the arcade, already messaging and checking for Yusuke.

He hadn’t expected his spur-of-the-moment selfishness to actually _work_.


	5. May 19th

When Akira’s alarm went off that morning, he rolled over and batted lazily at it like usual. His eyes adjusted slowly to the early light that filtered in through his window.

Then, he blinked.

There was a person cocooned in a blanket on his couch, the long form of their body almost reduced to a curled-up ball on the furniture that wasn’t designed to accommodate their height.

 Morgana yawned and stretched his limbs out, kneading with his paws at Akira’s feet through the blanket on the futon. “He slept over, remember?”

The sleep cast itself off of Akira’s brain and, yes, he _did_ recall the way he lied to Yusuke the night before about how they had gotten to the arcade and attempted to win at the claw machine.

He knew that he couldn’t reasonably tell the other boy the whole truth of the situation, but it stung to have to craft something up in the middle of an afternoon when they were supposed to be hanging out despite Akira overstepping Yusuke’s boundaries in the first place.

Guilt clung to him like the dust floating and settling through the air in the attic of Leblanc. If the Phantom Thieves could work through Yusuke’s performance piece of a Palace in a short enough amount of time, perhaps the blue-haired boy would find himself a little more willing to trust them in general.

Maybe he could even help them take down Madarame, like they had hoped in the first place.

Then, there was the matter of the other two puppeteers in Yusuke’s cognition. One was the same man as the thieves had helped out in Mementos – Akira was sure of it, there wasn’t just some coincidence between the names _and_ the appearance of the office worker – and the post he had put on the Phan site begged for them all to help out his younger brother figure.

Simply because of the connection, that had to be Yusuke. Both Nakanohara and Yusuke had a deep connection to Madarame; both of them required outside intervention to realign their distorted desires with reality, as well.

But what was so off about Yusuke, Akira couldn’t tell. The boy had trust issues, wanted simultaneously nothing from others and to stay over at someone’s house, and would go so far as to craft a make-shift weapon to attack his kidnapper when he had the chance.

That _wasn’t_ , however, the level of abuse Kamoshida had reached. From what he could see, it didn’t match up to Madarame’s self-centeredness, either. Easily, Yusuke was the calmest of the three.

“Hey, Morgana,” Akira turned to ask his furry companion, but was interrupted instead by the sounds of his temporary roommate waking up.

Yusuke looked even taller when he uncurled himself on the couch and he stretched his limbs out. It was only exacerbated by his wearing Akira’s clothes, having not gone home the night before to get any other supplies he might have needed.

As a result, Akira noticed when the barest hint of Yusuke’s stomach revealed itself from under the too-small clothes.

He looked away and fought off the distracting thoughts that raced through his mind.

“Good morning,” Yusuke drawled, his voice after just waking up an octave deeper than normal.

“Same to you,” Akira replied. He got out of bed and began scrounging up the things he needed to get ready for school. “You can get dressed up here,” he offered. “I’ll go to the bathroom downstairs. When you’re ready, just head on down. Sojiro probably left something for us for breakfast.”

Yusuke’s silent nod as he attempted to fix his bedhead was his only reply.

“I’ll be going, too,” Morgana meowled and hopped down from the futon. “Maybe boss left me something good, too!”

The other boy’s eyes went wide. He stared in Morgana’s direction and pointed somewhat shakily. “Did he just speak?”

Akira could _feel_ himself arriving to school late, then, despite his having gotten up with a twenty minutes cushion for traveling time.

“You must have hit your head harder than I thought,” is all he said, though, as he made an about-face and walked down the stairs two at a time.

“I suppose,” Yusuke replied in an almost whisper.

Morgana’s even speedier steps around him nearly tripped Akira up on the staircase and, once securely in the café area of the building, the two of them exchanged worried looks.

“Anyone who’s been in the Metaverse must be able to hear me,” Morgana whispered just before Akira closed the bathroom door.

“We can talk about it later,” he waved it off. All Akira could think of was what exactly this meant for what should have been his nice, quiet morning to dissect precisely what Yusuke was struggling with.

On top of that, when Akira checked his phone, he had several messages from Mishima that all involved official Phantom Thief business from the Phan site.

Sighing, Akira pulled off his sleeping shirt and replaced it with the long-sleeved turtleneck he had grown accustomed to wearing under the Shujin school blazer.

It was going to be a long day.

 

***

 

When Yusuke had asked Akira if he could spend the night, part of him wanted the other boy to say no, to get mad, to be upset with him. From everything Yusuke knew about his classmates, that would have been their reaction.

It frustrated Yusuke. Akira was right; it _was_ relying on others to try and spend time with them. The lie he had told Takahashi-san about making friends seemed to be coming true and it… bothered him. He had asked to stay over at Akira’s as an escape route from his typical living arrangement, yes, but that he even saw someone else as a potential place to hide was troubling.

He had neglected to text either Nakanohara or Takahashi-san until much later in the night – after Akira appeared to have fallen asleep – simply to make them worry, too.

Something in him screamed that if they wanted to act so concerned over him, perhaps he should give them a reason to. Maybe he could tell them some abridged version of his time with Madarame simply to see the shock light up their faces.

Nakanohara would curse, would storm out of the apartment, would stay late at his work and come home with some half-hearted excuse about overtime pay being too sweet to pass up.

Takahashi-san wouldn’t, though. She likely would only give Yusuke some soft expression, something that hinted at the sadness she felt.

No matter what, Yusuke knew that neither of them had the gall to really explain their feelings to him. All because he was younger, they would bottle up their worries inside and bear that hurt without complaint.

It made him sick to think about.

If they could endure Madarame’s verbal abuse, his neglect, and his twisted ideals concerning art, why couldn’t they make themselves trust someone they had stolen out of that situation? Besides, Yusuke had received the fullest extent of that treatment for years before they came along. He was stronger than they wanted to acknowledge; that much was for sure.

And, no matter what happened, Yusuke was _still_ being left out of the decision-making process. Even a year ago when they suggested he take several high school entrance exams, he could see the excitement in their eyes when he looked at pamphlets from Kosei.

It was obvious that they wanted him there, so when he received both a sufficient score and a scholarship based off of his well-received portfolio, he accepted without a second thought to please them.

Did his makeshift family want him there because they knew he still loved art, or did they simply want to push him in a direction they had been too scared to take for themselves? After all, Nakanohara worked in some government office now and Takahashi-san was an assistant nurse at a city hospital. Nothing art related there.

Was that why the other former student of Madarame’s had left their little apartment? Did she feel the same suffocating pressure that Yusuke did?

Even though he had gotten dressed and had gathered all of his things back into his school bag, Yusuke couldn’t seem to force himself down the stairs to meet with Akira.

The other boy may have been kind to a fault, but if Yusuke accepted the help and friendship that Akira apparently wanted to offer his way, it would have been like deciding to attend Kosei all over again. He would only be making decisions based on what other people wanted for him.

Those deep, charcoal-gray eyes, however… the artist within Yusuke still wanted to capture them for himself, if he had the chance. Maybe he could take some piece of Akira’s friendship in return for using his likeness in portraiture.

A compromise was _hardly_ leaning into what his guardians wanted, right?

“Yusuke,” Akira’s voice called from the bottom of the stairs. “Is curry okay for breakfast?”

The moment was broken. Instead of worry about how he would attempt to break free from the people that cared too heavily for him, Yusuke wondered at how Morgana had spoken.

He hadn’t just hallucinated that, right?

“Of course,” he yelled back, his phone in one hand and his bag in the other as he walked down the steps. “Is that what Boss serves here?”

Akira grinned a little, his eyes somehow dancing in the morning light that spilled in through the windows on the door. “And coffee, but he’s not here to make it fresh.”

Yusuke made a noise of surprise. “That hardly seems like a typical combination for a café.”

“Once you’ve tried it,” Akira slid two plates of curry onto one of the booths and took his seat. “You’ll change your mind.”

Yusuke sat opposite the other boy and, after only a couple of bites, he could see exactly what Akira meant. “The flavors that melded together overnight are beyond exquisite,” he praised between mouthfuls. “I feel as though I could run a marathon simply after one bowl.”

Akira laughed. “Sojiro has a knack for it for sure.” He gestured with his spoon to one of the bar stools that Morgana had curled up in. “Even he loves the stuff.”

“Curry is safe for cats?” Yusuke’s eyes widened. “I had no idea.”

“Morgana is a special case, most likely,” Akira replied with the spoon in his mouth. “But he still won’t eat cat food, so it’s what we’re stuck with.”

Yusuke checked the time. “I ought to be going soon,” he said, sliding out of the booth with his things. With a small bow, he continued, “Thank you for letting me stay over.” His eyes met Akira’s. “And of course, thank you for breakfast.”

The other boy waved him off. “No need for it. Boss thinks you’re too polite for your own good, so you’re welcome any time.”

After the chime above the door rang, Yusuke remembered one last thing. “Thank you for the Jack Frost, as well,” he called. Some of the embarrassment he had felt upon waking up that previous afternoon crept back into his face, but if Akira noticed anything, he didn’t mention it.

 

***

 

“So, he stayed over at your place?” Ann squealed, her smile full of mischief. During the break between classes, she had turned her chair around to ask Akira about how he managed to dodge the topic of Yusuke seeing his own Palace, but, well.

Akira found himself having to explain everything about the evening that followed, too.

Even if he preferred seeing Ann acting cheerily when compared to her expressions during the Kamoshida incident, having his developing friendship with Yusuke called into question still made him feel uneasy.

It wasn’t just that Ann was a nosy friend – which she _certainly_ was – he also hated being unable to put a precise label on his feelings for the other boy.

They went beyond worrying over someone whose sense of self had distorted, and he had no idea what to do about them.

“So, does he snore?” She snickered into her hand. “What are his pajamas like?” Her eyes lit up and Akira knew for sure that he would hate her next question. “Did you two share a bed?”

He was right.

“Ann,” he sighed, ignoring the suggestive glances Morgana was sending his way from inside his desk. “We’re trying to help him,” and he whispered the next part through gritted teeth, “not get into his pants.”

Ann pouted. “Can’t see why both couldn’t happen,” she shrugged and turned around.

The next teacher had begun to set his things up on the desk at the front and, despite the image of Yusuke half-asleep with one of Akira’s shirts riding up his torso firmly taking hold in Akira’s mind, he somehow managed to focus through the entire lecture.

Akira could nearly hear the “Nice one, Joker!” Morgana would have cheered his way if they had been in the Metaverse.

 

*

 

“Ann told me that Yusuke spent the night over at Leblanc,” Ryuji smirked. He was leaning up against the wall directly across from Akira and Ann’s homeroom, hands in his pockets, his gym uniform all sorts of against code.

“If you plan on asking me whether I slept with him,” Akira droned, trudging past the other boy, knowing that he would catch up quickly.

“Woah!” Ryuji acted affronted and waved his hands in the air. He jogged backwards just ahead of Akira in a moment, his expression surprisingly innocent. “I didn’t expect him to be the kind to kiss on the first date,” he said, “much less go all the way.”

Akira glared. “Nothing happened.”

Ryuji’s familiar smile returned. “I never said something _did_ , man. And don’t take Ann’s prying too personal, ya know?” He turned around to walk normally by Akira’s side, his gaze somewhere distant. “She’s been like that since middle school. When Shiho had her first kiss, Ann hounded her for weeks afterwards over what it was like.”

“And you weren’t?” Morgana grinned, just an ear twitching out of Akira’s bag.

Ryuji winked in his direction. “I never said that, either.”

“So, what do you want to know?” Akira sighed.

Ryuji sped past him, pumping his arms, and looked behind him with a wicked smile. “When the wedding’s gonna be!”

 

*

 

Akira couldn’t get his friends’ good-natured accusations out of his mind as he sat on the train, phone in hand. “If I try to hang out with him again today, does that seem desperate?”

Morgana gave him a withering look. “You’re asking me for love advice?”

Akira sighed and leaned back against the uncomfortable bench seat. He counted off on his fingers as he listed, “Ann and Ryuji are busy today, so we can’t go back into the Palace this afternoon. The library was too crowded for me to study. It’s too early for the bathhouse.” He looked down at Morgana. “What does that leave us with?”

The feline plopped his head on the edge of the bag. “Could always go work somewhere. Tuna _is_ expensive these days.”

Akira gave him a quick scratch behind the ear, despite the cat’s protestations. “Maybe we could try Raflessia. Hanasaki looked busy the last time I walked by.”

 

***

 

Yusuke nearly always stayed after school to work on something, but he couldn’t bring himself to return back to the apartment any sooner than necessary when he felt this annoyed.

Momentarily, as he set up his supplies to continue working on his charcoal piece for his submission to his school-wide exhibit, he considered asking the administration if he could move into the dorms at Kosei.

It would solve his problem of being smothered, at the very least.

However, as always in the art world, money was an issue. Yusuke cursed his inability to find a part-time job close to his school. There had been several advertised one weekend in the Shibuya train station, but when he looked again only a few hours later, the fliers were all taken.

At least the charcoal was working with him today. He rolled up his sleeves, not wanting to have to wash his clothes this evening after losing all of yesterday to frivolity, and began tentatively sketching out a background.

The light in the studio that afternoon was lacking, unfortunately. While the sunlight had been brilliant just a few days ago and he had been able to decide where the light source in the piece would accordingly rest, the moment had passed for the perfection that was the tantalizing glow over his sketched figure’s form.

He cursed his own impatience.

Using loose-limbed and imprecise wrist, he broadly pigmented his chosen sections of the canvas and, after a few minutes of simply marking swaths of the piece into shadow, Yusuke felt at least somewhat satisfied in the direction it was taking.

He took a moment to stretch, not wanting to suffer the same fate as one of the other students in his self-directed class who had been missing as a result of her carpal tunnel surgery.

If he was to be as successful in the art world as he desired – if he truly was to break out into the field and inspire others to do the same – he would, at some point, have to take care of himself.

His rumbling stomach disagreed with him. Rather than take a snack break, he decided to forge on with the piece. It _was_ only a little while, after all. He would return to the apartment at some point that evening and eat. His progress as an artist was certainly more important than the desires of the flesh.

He stopped for a second, in the middle of a detailed section of crosshatching. Who was it that taught him to put his own needs second?

Even more, who was it that suggested he needed to change?

No matter what he did, Yusuke considered in that agonizing moment, he would still be following in someone else’s directed path. He wanted to scream, no matter the stares he knew he would receive. Until his throat hurt, until the tears he felt burning inside of him found release, he wanted to wail. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Is P5 supposed to be in 2015 or 2016...   
> Waaaaah ;;   
> The dates in this fic are all based on 2015, so please, forgive me if I'm wrong!


	6. May 21st

Yusuke wandered through the Shibuya train station, looking for the perfect spot to people watch. Perhaps his own inner struggles could be alleviated by getting into the mindset of some other passersby.

He celebrated mild success, at the very least, until he caught sight of Akira walking in the midst of the crowd before him. He considered simply observing from a distance like he had intended to for the entire afternoon, but the other boy had a fierce look of determination on his face and it make Yusuke’s hands tingle with the need to rough out a sketch of the handsome dark-haired boy.

Yusuke wanted to ask what had brought about such passion into Akira’s usually placid expression. He so often acted as a mirror, it appeared, and for him to emote so strongly…

A strange, jealous curiosity bubbled up within Yusuke. Even though he told himself that getting attached would only lead to someone else directing his every move, he found himself entirely taken by the way Akira could seemingly redirect other’s emotions back to them.

When he replayed the scene of his waking on Akira’s lap that one evening, after all, he had found that same flush fanning out on the other boy’s features that he could feel burning into his own.

Nothing else made sense in Yusuke’s mind. Surely, somewhere, someone had made Akira’s focus so single-minded that he would wear that determined look on his face even in a crowd of people.

Yusuke wanted to know who had caused it.

Without intending to, as if following the muse blindly, he found himself taking careful steps so that he could still make out Akira’s place in the crowd while remaining undetected. Even from a distance, there was something intriguing in the way the boy walked. Was it catlike? Was it regal? Was it purely _attractive_?

The gaps in that afternoon’s events before he woke up in the arcade were distressing, but most of all, the distinct impression that he had seen Akira dressed up like some gentleman (down to a flowing waistcoat) was bizarre.

Stranger still, the feeling that snuck into his mind upon considering these impressions was more than a simple aesthetic appreciation for the attire the other boy wore. Akira, wearing a suit and coat, was…

Yusuke preferred to ignore the lump in his throat and, instead, continue after the boy himself.

When he saw Akira passing through a turnstile for a train that could have dropped him off in the direction of Kosei, however, Yusuke stopped in his tracks.

If Akira wanted to surprise him by showing up at his school, they were decidedly closer friends that Yusuke had intended them becoming. It would be better for him to keep his distance – physically, as well as emotionally – that afternoon.

People watching for inspiration would have to suffice.

 

***

 

“He’s not tailing us anymore,” Akira said, confused, as he rounded a corner in the Shibuya station.

“That’s not a bad thing,” Morgana replied as he rustled around in the bag. “We didn’t want to drag him back into his own Palace anyway.”

“Still weird. Unless we got the wrong impression, he was definitely following us.” He stood still on the platform and looked down the tunnel from his spot to see if the train was close by.

Morgana twitched an ear through the open zipper. “It’s not important now. You can text him later if it bothers you that much.”

“I guess you’re right. We have something else we need to focus on instead.”

“Exactly. We have no idea how large his Palace is, so if we want to secure a route to the treasure, we’ll have to find a map at some point.”

“And,” Akira added, stepping onto the train after its doors opened, “We still have Madarame to worry about. His exhibition is on until the beginning of June, but that doesn’t give us much time to complete two Palaces.”

“We don’t have an option. If we’re going to help Yusuke _and_ take down Madarame, this is the hand we’ve been dealt.”

“It still would be nice to have more help.”

Morgana poked his head of out the bag and grinned reassuringly at Akira. “The Phantom Thieves are stronger than that, Joker! We can change hearts, no matter the odds!”

Akira couldn’t help but return the smile. “You’re right, Mona.”

 

*

 

Skull stretched his arms by swinging them from side to side. “I guess there’s no performance today,” he suggested.

Panther shrugged. “It sure seemed that way. The place is still all cleared out – we didn’t even need this backstage area to be a safe room.”

“Keep your guard up just in case,” Joker advised. “There’s no telling if the shadows are all hiding out somewhere different.”

With a wave and an open door, the four thieves headed out back onto the main stage. Like Panther had pointed out, the audience from the last time they were there simply wasn’t in attendance.

Even the puppets and other props Akira had expected to find lying around were gone.

When they had infiltrated Kamoshida’s Palace, certain areas _had_ been more concentrated with shadows on some days than others. It was possible that was the case here, as well. It was still odd, though.

They jumped off of the stage and made their way back towards the wide-open foyer that had held the arriving guests, but no one was there, either.

“This is weird, right, Mona?” Panther asked. “It’s a ghost town around here.”

Joker strode over to the still ornately decorated marble table with its grandiose flower arrangement, but there weren’t any programs covering every inch of free space on it. “Looks like the performers really are taking a break.”

“We need a map,” Mona reiterated. “If there are more enemies further in, it could mean that Yusuke’s put his guard up.”

“How would we take care of that?” asked Skull.

“We’ll cross that bridge when we get to it,” Joker shook his head. “For now, Mona’s right. Figuring out the layout is our top priority.”

Even the box office was empty, they soon found, and the furniture that they had turned over in their search for tickets to the play was still as topsy-turvy as they had left it.

However, the hallway that lay to the right of the box office had yet to be explored. “Come on,” Joker called, and they all fell in line behind him.

Beyond a set of double doors, the hallway continued on, a vast collection of posters lining the walls. Each one was carefully framed and, because of how they were all crammed along the hall, there seemed to be no real order to them. The only unifying aspect was that each had a picture of the performers and the puppets used, like would be seen on a program from a show.

“It looks like they’re based on performances,” Panther pointed out. “Look, this one is dated as a long time ago, in January.”

“Are these Yusuke’s memories?” Skull asked, staring at another poster. “This one’s from last April. It looks like it’s from some kind of opening ceremony.”

“What’s the year on yours, Panther?” Joker called out from the other end of the hall.

“2000,” she answered, turning her head. “Why?”

“I think it might be his birthday. This one’s from January in 2003.”

“There’s one from January here, too,” Mona agreed.

“Are these the big events in his life, then?”

“No tellin’.”

“More doors,” Joker sighed pushing one open experimentally. “Looks like this could take a while.”

However, beyond that set of doors was an expansive room nearly the size of the performance hall they had been in. Tall, almost ceiling-high works of art were placed haphazardly throughout the room. They all seemed to depict some sort of scenery and likely, if Joker’s guess was right, were the backgrounds to the performances.

“This one’s wet,” Skull complained in a whisper as he shook his hand off. “Someone’s been here recently.”

When the group looked behind one of the panels of drying art, they saw an extremely pale boy with dark blue hair wearing a matching colored _yukata_. It had white circles in a pattern around his chest and arms and, in his hands, he was controlling a doll-sized puppet with long hair tied up in a ponytail.

Even the puppet was wearing ornate dress, itself garbed in a lighter blue _yukata_ with a black _obi_ tied around its waist and thin stripes along the seams of the garment. Just like the scene it was painting – because the human controlling it was merely moving the brush it held it its hands - it had small, white blossoms along the bottom of its billowing sleeves and near where its feet would have been. Foxes the color of the snow glanced around in several directions at the bottom of the robe.

The whole thing, for being a part of a Palace, was beautiful.

Akira looked at the mural the two figures were painting in tandem and noticed that it was the same backdrop as had been part of the play the last time the entered the Palace. It was worn and patched up in odd places, the evidence of their on-stage fight obvious.

No matter what, however, he was still unable to place what seemed familiar about the sky and empty tree that faded into the mist. Was there another painting he knew that looked like this?

The figure holding the puppet turned to greet them. With a flick of his wrist, the puppet in his hands waved at them with its tiny, wooden free hand.

It was entirely different to meeting Kamoshida’s shadow self. When Akira and Ryuji had barged into that place, knights acted like guards and imprisoned them. Here, there was a serenity in the room.

Yusuke, the figure in the dark robe, was both the puppeteer painting the scenery for the performances in the front of the Palace _and_ a puppet-actor himself.

“He looks sad,” Panther pointed out, clutching her hand to her chest. “I – I don’t understand what this means in our world.”

“Neither do I,” Skull huffed. “I got it when he was a puppet, but this is weird.”

Joker stepped forward towards Yusuke’s shadow self and ignored the others. “What are you working on?” he asked, kneeling beside Yusuke.

The shadow moved its eyes from Joker’s to the puppet as if suggesting Joker was speaking to the wrong person.

“I’m afraid I don’t understand,” Joker shook his head.

In the shadow’s gleaming yellow eyes was a thick, palpable sadness that almost seemed dejected. It shifted its gaze to the ground, not meeting Joker’s eyes.

“I want to talk to you,” Joker offered.

“What are you doing?” Mona gasped, exasperated. “It’s his shadow self, we don’t need to be negotiating with it!”

“But it’s not attacking us,” Panther responded. “Maybe Joker’s right.” She walked over to join her leader and put a hand on the shadow’s shoulder. “We’re just here to help.”

Skull glanced around him, seemingly checking out his surroundings, but he shrugged his shoulders and sat next to Yusuke’s shadow after a moment, too.

Joker screwed up his face in concentration. “Do you _want_ to be here?” He asked the shadow, moving his hand from its shoulder to the bangs that hung its face as it stubbornly refused to meet their gaze. Brushing them aside, he couldn’t help but notice that even as a shadow, Yusuke was beautiful.

Almost imperceptibly, the shadow shook its head.

Joker glanced over at Mona. “Any ideas? We’re kind of flying blind here.”

From behind one of the set pieces, an inky, formless shadow appeared. It took the shape of the player Madarame from the other day and began stomping its feet at them. “Do _not_ talk with anyone, Yusuke! How difficult is that to understand?”

The shadow Yusuke, if possible, crumpled in on itself even further.

“Your task is to paint for my performances, nothing else,” Madarame growled. The fists that had remained undetailed shot into existence and, as the shadow lumbered over to the group sitting with Yusuke, it lunged at the boy.

Hands that had controlled the real Yusuke in puppet form just a few days prior now clamped down over the shadow Yusuke’s neck, choking him and shaking his head as it screamed.

“If you can’t even paint a good enough decoration for the stage, how will you ever move onto it as more than a tool?” The shadow spit into Yusuke’s face, its features losing any semblance of humanity that it held when in Madarame’s form. “Didn’t you say you wanted to be an artist just like your pitiful mother?”

Joker grabbed at the shadow’s waist and pulled with all of his strength. “Let go of him,” he commanded, his arms snapping through the torso of the shadow in his might.

When it tried to reform, its arms moving from Yusuke’s neck to where its legs lay, Joker shot it in the head.

“I meant it,” he said, all suggestion of kindness gone from his voice as he held the smoking pistol up, still aimed at Madarame.

The shadow version of Yusuke abandoned its puppet, casting it to the side, and scrambled onto its feet. Slipping on the edge of its robe, this Yusuke fell flat on its face rather than escape as it seemingly had intended to.

“Yusuke,” Skull sighed, kneeling next to the terrified shadow. “Here.” He extended his hand.

Panther smiled and offered her own. “You’re not alone, you know.”

Mona held out a paw to the prone figure. “Whatever’s bothering you, leave it to us!”

The shadow’s terror melted into unadulterated fury. For the first time, it spoke aloud. “I won’t be used,” its voice bellowed, distorted and echoing from the size of the room.

If Joker didn’t know better, he might have called it crying.

“I cannot be taken in by anyone’s cheap tricks,” the shadow continued, the warbling in its voice still present. It slapped the hands of the thieves away and, getting to its feet, picked up the puppet it had thrown away. “Friends, family, those are but mere words people use to control others.”

He gazed into the puppet’s eyes and, taking the brush from its hand, painted a face on it that matched his own rage. “Nothing lasts in this world. The impermanence, which could be used to spur people on towards what is good, is instead what fuels the corrupt. Because their days are numbered, they think they ought to grab at whatever chance they have to take what is unrightfully theirs.”

“You’re wrong, Yusuke,” Joker shook his head. “People make mistakes and they push themselves on others, but not everyone is out to get you.”

The Shadow narrowed its eyes and the puppet in its hand transformed into a massive half-fox half-humanoid with large ears and wide, glowing, red eyes. The puppet, now tall enough to fill most of the room’s height, sprouted nine tails with curling red flames on its otherwise entirely white body.

Even for a shadow, it looked otherworldly, as if bathed in the glow of some abnormal moon.

“I thought the shadow would only attack like this once we went after its treasure,” Panther’s eyes darted back and forth between Mona and the puppet that Yusuke’s shadow controlled.

“We didn’t even send out a calling card,” Skull added. “What gives?”

“Does it really matter?” Mona asked. “We’re being attacked!”

“It _does_ matter if it means the difference between a mental shutdown and a change of heart,” Panther skidded out of the way of one of the tails’ attacks. She leaned forward, grabbed at her whip, and slapped it down on the tail closest to her. “That’s not our intention here!”

“She’s right,” Joker tore his mask from his face and, calling upon Arsene’s power, shot a fiery Eiga blast at the tail closest to him. “We need to focus on taking down this puppet, but once it’s gone, we’re back to treasure hunting.”

Skull slammed the brunt of his and Captain Kidd’s weight into the main body of the puppet, lurching forward with it. “Any idea what it could be weak to?”

Mona slashed at its robe, now torn and hanging off of its body loosely, with a gust of wind. “No telling, yet.”

Panther, channeling Carmen’s flame, managed to burn one of the tails off entirely.

The puppet shrieked in pain, recoiled, and held its remaining eight tails in its still-wooden hands.

“Perfect timing,” Joker smirked, switching personas, “Jack o’ Lantern, come! Agi!”

Another tail caught on fire and, this time, the puppet sank to the ground in a heap.

“Everyone, all in, now!”

The thieves moved in unison, slashing, hacking, and scorching every square inch of the enemy they could reach. When it finally wailed out a hollow moan, they backed off to watch its ashes float into the air along with the final burst of Mona’s wind.

“Y- you,” Yusuke’s shadow-self wailed, falling to its knees in front of the puppet. “How will I paint now?” When it looked into Joker’s eyes, the glowing yellow irises that all shadows possessed were melting away into a watery gray. Reaching into its robe, Yusuke shoved a piece of photography paper into Joker’s hand. “Take it, it is all I have left, and then leave me!”

Joker turned the picture over several times, but nothing appeared. “What is it?”

The shadow pulled its knees to its chin and sniffled. “It means nothing now, I suppose.” Its lower lip jutted out in a definite pout. “Now that everyone has gone away, nothing matters.”

“We’re not leaving though,” Panther supplied, quirking her head to the side.

However, a moment later, the very floor beneath them began to quake.

“Mmm, now we are,” Skull said, his voice revealing his anxiousness. “We gotta get out of here, Joker!”

“She’s right, you know,” Joker said as he tucked the photo paper into his sleeve. “You’re not alone. And if you can put up this much of a fight in the real world,” he smiled and gestured to the cinders that once had formed the puppet, “I don’t think anyone even _could_ ignore what you wanted.”

The vaguest outline of a kitsune mask, white and red like the puppet had been, lay atop of Yusuke’s shadow’s face. “I see,” it said in an almost whisper. Tucking its hands to its chest, it nodded. “Perhaps you are right.”

As the other thieves dashed off towards the entrance, Joker thought he saw the shadow fizzle out into nonexistence.

 

***

 

Yusuke sat on one of the hard metal benches that populated the Shibuya train station walkway. With his head planted firmly in his hands, he felt inconsolable as something wrenched in his heart and unbidden tears streaked down his face.

“What _is_ this?” he mouthed, pulling his hands away to see the wetness on his palms. “This feeling is terrible,” he almost chuckled. He wrapped his arms around his torso in an embrace.

Perhaps it was guilt.

When he considered how had spent the last few hours – watching people as they passed by and still only able to think of his own life, his own perspective – all he felt was selfish.

Deep down, he had been acting like a petulant child. Whether it was blaming his friends and fellow former pupils of Madarame or affixing all of the problems of his youth to that singular man, none of it would come to any good. No matter how correct he was, it was unproductive.

He could only paint with the supplies he had bought; he could only live a life based on his past experiences. Without them, the artist he was today and the (he assured himself, then) one he would be in the future simply wouldn’t exist.

Almost lazily, he turned his hands over and took stock of how truly ruined his fingernails had become. When he was alone, locked in Madarame’s house, and told to paint or else he would die… What had been going on in his mind? All he could remember was a blinding, sulfurous and boiling rage. No words; just anger, pure and thick.

He shook his head and picked at the raised-up pieces of his pointer fingernail. While his nails were all scraped to somewhere beneath the quick, in time, they would repair themselves. He would be much the same.

Something in him yearned to call his roommates, to hear their voices in that moment, but he knew that they were both working at that point in the day.

Standing to his feet, he once again placed his school bag on his shoulder.

Ah, well. He would be able to talk to them that night, or the next morning. Or some other time. There were many days left for him in high school and, despite the overbearing nature that both Takahashi-san and Nakanohara held towards him, their well-meaning love was communicated even in their most annoying moments.

They had saved him from Madarame once, when he was young and incapable of separating himself from the detestable man. In keeping him fed and housed and schooled, they had been carrying out that salvation even further for him.

And then there was the matter of the three other high schoolers and their cat that had come to his rescue when he had been taken in by Madarame’s silken words once again.

Perhaps he could do something for them, as well, as a sign of his thanks.

 

***

 

“I’m exhausted, man,” Ryuji slumped himself into one of the vinyl-covered chairs at Big Bang Burger.

Ann’s head rested on the table, her arms folded in front of her. “You and me both.”

Akira laughed to himself as he set down the trays of food, placing his bag and Morgana inside of it on the seat next to him. “Good work today, everyone.”

“That was a helluva lot shorter than Kamoshia’s Palace, and he didn’t put up too much of a fight, but I’m still drained,” Ryuji played with the straw paper, trying to toss it into Ann’s hair.

She batted him away, still smiling even if the vein on her forehead displayed itself. “Isn’t that just a side effect of being in the Metaverse?”

Morgana nodded and stole a French fry with a swipe on his paw.

Akira glared at the feline from the corner of his eye and took an overly large bite of his burger.

“Well, it’s not like we know some crime Yusuke’s committed,” Ann whispered, leaning into the table. “So how will we know when he’s changed? It took a few days for Kamoshida to confess everything.”

“It’s possible that we won’t,” Morgana answered.

“Or,” Akira smiled, pushing out of his chair and running to the door, “we’ll know immediately.” He waved to the blue-haired boy passing by and called out, “Yusuke, over here!”

The artist’s eyes perked up and he entered the building with Akira. “Oh, hello, everyone,” he waved quietly.

“We can pull up a chair — ” Akira started, hands stuttering around as he searched for a spare seat.

“No need,” Yusuke shook his head. “I truly ought to be heading home about now.”

Ann gave an overly cheery smile. “How have you been feeling lately?” She asked.

Ryuji elbowed her in the ribs just under the table.

“I have felt,” Yusuke acted as though he might clutch at his heart, “a bit strange lately. Perhaps, some of it stems from having my former sensei’s face plastered all over Shibuya.” He had a wistful look in his eye, almost bashful, as if saying something difficult because of sentimentality.

“Are you sure you don’t want to stay?” Akira asked. He hated not knowing anything, always wanted to understand other people, but the multi-faceted shine over Yusuke’s eyes in that moment was something he would have been content to muse over forever.

He knew he was swallowing around a lump in his throat, suddenly.

“I believe I have an apology to make to some of my dear friends,” Yusuke glanced in the other direction, out the window.

“Oh,” was all Akira said.

The blondes watched carefully – eyes alight with mischief – and if either of the boys had been looking their way, it would have been obvious what they were thinking.

Neither of the boys did, however.

Yusuke rubbed at the back of his neck and, with a slight bow towards the group, excused himself.

“You’re _hopeless_ ,” Ann commented, a lilt in her tone, as soon as the door closed behind Yusuke.

Akira would have stammered out an answer, but he decided it was better to simply sit back down and eat his food in the face of their teasing.

After all, if the way his chest tightened meant what he thought it did, they were right.

 

***

 

“Yusuke,” Takahashi-san called when she opened the door. “I got off work early and, I hope you don’t mind, but — ” she dropped her jaw in surprise, quickly covering her mouth with her free hand.

In the time between when Yusuke’s arrival at home and Takahashi-san’s, he had set up two small easels and placed two layers of newspapers along the floor of the kitchen. There were a small handful of brushes and tubes of acrylic paints, the cheap sort like from any craft supply store, but they were _real_ and _tangible_ and _in their apartment_.

“I don’t understand,” she asked as she shook her head. “What is all this for?”

Yusuke felt small in that moment, holding one arm with another, nearly hanging his head to meet her eye level. “Neither of you have made use of your artistic skills since we all left. I attend a fine arts school and am surrounded by it, but…” He trailed off.

She wrapped her arms around him and planted a solid kiss on his cheek. “You’re the sweetest little brother I could ask for, Yusuke.” Takahashi-san’s eyes glistened like she might cry, but she let her lip wobble and held it together.

Part of Yusuke was appreciative for that, too.

“So,” she began, her voice revealing her excitement as she pulled off her name tag from work and placed her shoes by the entryway. “What should I paint?”


	7. May 23rd

<< YUSUKE(04:19): I had intended to apologize to you all as well. Circumstances, however, dictated that I needed to prioritize my… family of sorts.

<< YUSUKE(04:19): If I can do anything to be of assistance to you all, considering your beyond courteous acts towards me, I would be at your doorstep immediately.

<< YUSUKE(04:23): Ahh, I have just noticed the time. I apologize for messaging you at this hour.

Akira almost laughed himself out of bed. Even if he didn’t know Yusuke as well as he might have liked, the way the other boy texted seemed to _exude_ his very essence. Somehow, Yusuke managed to cram all of his eccentricities into conversation even that early in the morning.

Morgana gave Akira a funny look and paused in his grooming. “Any reason you’re grinning like that?”

Akira shook his head no and went to reply. “Do you think Yusuke could have a persona?”

Morgana’s eyes narrowed.

“What?” Akira asked.

>> AKIRA(06:43): I’m actually interested in learning about the painting we saw reprints of in Madarame’s house

>> AKIRA(06:43): I’m sure it’s a sore subject though, so if it’s too much then

Akira was in the middle of typing “don’t worry about it” when he received another message.

<< YUSUKE(6:43): It’s the painting that made me want to become an artist.

“He’s fast when he wants to be,” he shook his head.

“Who is?” Morgana asked, pawing his way over to read Akira’s texts.

<< YUSUKE(6:44): Madarame himself painted it and, because of its mysterious central figure’s qualities, many have chosen to study it for their life’s work.

<< YUSUKE(6:44): It is possible that Madarame’s wealth owes the bulk of its existence to _Sayuri_.

Hesitating, Akira began to type out another message.

“Why do you think he’d be able to summon a persona?” Morgana meowed.

“Maybe it’s wishful thinking,” Akira shrugged, “but we don’t know the keyword into Madarame’s Palace. It would be much easier to infiltrate if we had someone like Yusuke on our side.”

Morgana batted at one of his ears. “I don’t know of anyone who’s had a Palace becoming a persona user, but it’s not like it should be impossible.” He grinned. “Yusuke would just have to be as rebellious at heart as us.”

“His shadow had a mask on it when his Palace crumbled,” Akira pointed out. “It might not mean anything, but… with a little push in the right direction, he might awaken something.”

<< YUSUKE(6:46): Beyond the craft required to paint _Sayuri_ , however, I have always felt a certain draw to it. Something about it captivates me beyond any other work of similar skill. When studying under Madarame, he never painted anything that quite matched its appeal.

>> AKIRA(6:47): It sounds like everything about it is wonderful to you, then

>> AKIRA(6:47): When we were at the exhibit, I thought I saw a painting like it on display

>> AKIRA(6:47): Do you think it’s the real thing?

<< YUSUKE(6:48): Quite unlikely. There were a number of well-made fakes that Morgana discovered in Madarame’s house. If you went with me…

>> AKIRA(6:56): Yusuke?

<< YUSUKE(6:59): We might be able to get a good look at it. Truly, the real thing is something I have spent many hours studying. If Madarame has placed a false copy in the exhibition, it would be to his shame.

“Do you think I should?” Akira looked down at Morgana.

“What, invite him into the Phantom Thieves?” the cat had a sly look on his face.

“No, just, peek around with him. Besides,” he ran his hand through his curly mop of hair. “I need to give him that blank photo from his Palace.”

Morgana’s tail flicked in a curved arc. “If you’re right about him being able to wield a persona, that alone could trigger the reaction he’d need. Someone’s treasure _is_ their most important thing, after all. Seeing it might remind him of just what he needs to do.”

“We’ll be late to class if we sit around much longer,” Akira noted, finally paying attention to the time. “Let’s go, Morgana.”

>> AKIRA(7:00): So when should we check it out?

 

*

 

“Wait, you want to go to his house?” Akira could hardly count the number of ways in which that was a bad idea. When Yusuke had suggested checking out the _Sayuri_ ’s authenticity earlier, Akira had assumed the one on display, not the numerous prints in Madarame’s _locked home_.

Yusuke shrugged, his facial expression indifferent. “I assume you took pictures of the copies for the police,” he explained. “If this is part of an investigation, then we should do our part to ensure the truth comes out.”

Akira clutched the straps of his school bag a little tighter as though Morgana could come up with a way out of this. “I — ” he paused, considered things for a moment. “I think we need to get Ann and Ryuji in on this. We’re _not_ sanctioned by the law,” he looked in the direction of the crowd milling about the Shibuya underground mall, “but you’re right. We can’t let this continue.”

“Even though he no longer has any students,” Yusuke put his hand to his chin and thought aloud, “he still manages to keep his name unsullied. I wonder the sort of blackmail he forced the others into when they left.” He looked tired the more he spoke. “We have already lost one of us to his carelessness. I will not abide by this any longer.”

Nodding, Akira placed his hand on Yusuke’s shoulder reassuringly. “Those who would knowingly take advantage of anyone without power should be punished.” He removed his hand and pulled the photo paper from his blazer’s pocket. “We found this in Madarame’s house on that day,” he said, not sure how to explain the truth.

(If his hunch was right, the need to lie would soon come to an end.)

“I wasn’t sure when was the right time to give it back to you, but.” He shrugged a little and began to text Ann and Ryuji, telling them to hurry to the mall as soon as they could. With any luck, Ann was already around the corner somewhere.

“How curious,” Yusuke said with a lightness to his voice. “I had no idea this still existed.”

Akira looked up over the top of his glasses. “What is it? I couldn’t really see anything, but I figured there was no harm in taking it with us.”

Yusuke moved to stand beside Akira, bumping shoulders with him in the process. He held the picture up to the hazy lights overhead and pointed to two figures that were barely distinguishable from the almost fog over the rest of the image. With the most fondness in his voice that Akira had heard from him, Yusuke smiled. “While I don’t remember it, this is from the last birthday I ever spent with my mother. Unfortunately, the flash overexposed the image and without the marvel that is digital photography, she had no way of knowing until it was printed.”

He stayed silent for a beat, simply taking in the sight that was his mother.

If Akira squinted, now that Yusuke had explained what it was, he could almost make out the long, dark hair on the taller figure and the overly-wide grin on the smaller one. Despite how washed out they both were, it was charming.

That had been his heart’s treasure.

Akira was still marveling over the innocent look on the young Yusuke’s face when the other boy himself said,

“I don’t know how I could repay you for your kindnesses already. I — ” he cut himself off and, without warning, wrapped his thin arms around Akira as tightly as he could manage.

“Yusuke?” Akira asked, one of his hands moving, unbidden, to reciprocate the hold on the boy’s back.

“I had forgotten how dear it was to have people that cared about me,” his head leaned down to rest on Akira’s shoulder. While the rest of him felt too cold for that day’s weather, Yusuke’s face burned even through Akira’s clothes.

Akira could feel a laugh bubbling up in his chest. With all of his might, he ignored the looks they were receiving and simply held the taller boy, feeling the same warmth build up in his chest that he could feel radiating onto his shoulder. “Please,” he began, having to close his eyes halfway through, “Never change, Yusuke.”

The moment was broken by one loud cheer from across the mall. Even with the sound of Ryuji’s footfalls nearing them, Akira couldn’t find it in himself to make Yusuke let go.

The other boy extricated himself a moment later, glancing away meaningfully and rubbing his face with the palms of his hands.

“Ann’s on her way,” Ryuji said sheepishly, realizing that he had embarrassed the other two. “Sorry, I just — ”

“Think nothing of it,” Yusuke smiled. His face was still pink, and his eyes looked puffy, but he had recovered quickly enough. “People tell me all the time that I have difficulties with social cues.”

“So I’m loud, you’re an idiot, and he’s a delinquent.” Ryuji huffed. “What a crew we are.”

Yusuke’s expression soured. “I’ll have you know that I — ”

“What am I, then?” Ann’s called as she waved to the boys. “The brains?”

Ryuji rolled his eyes. “Hardly. You _speak_ English and you still barely passed that exam.”

“I did better than you, mister forty-three.”

“They could do this for a while,” Akira glanced over at Yusuke. “It’s best we start walking now so we get there before Madarame even leaves the exhibit.”

 

*

 

Akira had received a text, if his phone vibrating in his pocket was anything to go by, but it felt inappropriate to check his messages at a time like this. According to Yusuke’s directions (which were decidedly less haphazard than Morgana’s), they were only a block or so from the street Madarame lived on.

However, Ann _was_ giving him several pointed looks, so Akira decided to chance the guilty feeling.

<< ANN(16:03): Have you told him about the Metaverse yet?

He closed the app, put his phone back in his pocket, and returned her gaze with an equally frustrated one.

“Don’t you need to answer that?” She asked, all bubbly on the outside.

“No, it’ll be fine,” he answered for both questions at once.  

Ann chewed on her bottom lip and fell behind in walking.

When they reached the house, Yusuke looked expectantly at the others. “What do you propose we do next?”

From his pocket, Akira opened up the MetaNav. “Madarame Ichiryusai,” he pretended to think aloud, humming over the sound of the app responding in the affirmative. “What do you think he thinks of his art?” Taking a risk if things went wrong, Akira bet that Yusuke knew the man well enough to guess his keyword in one go if he had some direction.

The other boy didn’t disappoint. “That it belongs in a museum, of course,” he frowned. “All artists aim to have their works represented somewhere that feels eternal.”

In that moment, the soft glow of the MetaNav transporting them into Madarame’s Palace overtook them and transformed the Phantom Thieves.

Surprisingly, Yusuke reacted well, his frown only deepening. “I knew I wasn’t dreaming,” he almost clapped his hands together, apparently impressed with himself. “I _did_ see you all like this once before.”

“We’ve been hiding some things,” Joker nodded, gesturing to the others. He removed his mask. “This is what’s called the Metaverse. Using this world, we can affect change in our own.”

Mona gave Joker a look, but Skull shook his head excitedly and stepped forward, taking his mask off as well. Panther followed suit.

After another instant of hesitation, Mona did the same.

“We are the Phantom Thieves of Heart. Places like this are called Palaces, and they only appear when someone’s desires have grown distorted. By stealing their treasure, the representation of what they value most, we force their hands into changing for the better.”

 

***

 

“ — the better.”

Yusuke wanted to agree, wanted to go along with it simply for the thrill of it all, but his mind stuck fast onto one point: Akira was the handsome gentleman he had seen that afternoon.

“How many people has this worked on?” He asked instead, attempting to appear rational despite the maelstrom of questions that swirled around in his mind.

“Two,” Ryuji’s grin spoke of his pride in the matter. “Including you.”

Yusuke took a step back. “I – distorted? My…” He was confused and likely needed a minute to truly parse everything out, but upon looking around him for something reasonable to hold onto in this strange situation, he found only the gaudiest show of opulence he had ever witnessed.

He clenched his fists. “So, this is what Madarame thinks of himself?”

“Essentially,” Akira shrugged, placing his mask back on.

“One more point before we begin infiltration!” The cat mascot spoke.

 _Wait_ , who did that correspond to in the real world?

“Morgana?” Yusuke held up a shaking finger in the feline’s direction. He looked to Akira for confirmation and the boy simply snickered.

“When you woke up at Leblanc and heard him speak, you weren’t going crazy. Everyone who has been to the Metaverse can hear him, it seems.”

“And that’s exactly what I was going to address,” Morgana huffed and crossed his paws. “In Palaces, because we don’t want anyone to know who is changing their hearts — ”

“And because it’s cool,” Ann deadpanned.

“ — we go by codenames. I’m Mona, she’s Panther, he’s Skull, and our leader is Joker.”

“Alright, fine. Now,” Yusuke sighed into his heads and shook his head. Would this ever _truly_ make sense? “Why are all of you in costume and not me?”

Joker placed a gloved hand on Yusuke’s shoulder and waved the rest of the team on. “We’ll see if we can fix that soon enough,” he said in lieu of an explanation.

If Yusuke hadn’t been standing in the middle of an entirely gilded walkway that led towards an entirely gold plated museum with throngs of people squeezing in, he might have had a more difficult time going along with all of this.

“Won’t the line take quite some time to get through?” he asked.

“We’re thieves,” Skull shook his head. “We don’t go through regular _entrances_.”

The four of them began to dash towards the line of cars that lay surreptitiously along a lighted path to the side of the building. When they reached a wall, Joker gestured for Yusuke to follow his lead and he jumped over the ledge onto the thin concrete outcropping.

“You expect me to do that?” Yusuke asked, incredulous.

“Just try it,” Panther agreed, herself jumping over the height that seemed an improbable task at best.

However, Yusuke had longer legs than her, so if she could manage it…

When he thought about it in hindsight, it was the mere belief that he could accomplish the leap that supplied him the strength to, really. Even midair, when he should have felt scared to fall before reaching the height he intended, some part of him simply assumed that the others would grab his hands and pull him up if he should slip.

Perhaps _that_ was the magic, then, if it could be called magic.

However, he landed with no uneasy footing on what should have been an impossibly thin ledge. It was beyond exhilarating.

He was sure he had a childish look on his face when he realized he had accomplished the feat but, then again, the others seemed to mirror his exact expression. Were they all as excited as that with every stunt?

“Let’s keep going, then,” Joker exclaimed, that wide, cocky grin plastered to his face that Yusuke felt required a portrait in return.

That would have to wait, though. For now, he was _flying_.

 

***

 

If there was an opening, take it. Even though it made some noise, the group of them had managed to pry open a window along the rooftop and slide down inside the museum undetected. They had entered through a gap in the security, luckily, so Yusuke’s first romp through a Palace that he was cognizant for was uneventful as of yet.

Joker would have preferred that over the noisy entrance he and Ryuji had into Kamoshida’s Palace, for sure.

Like in a proper museum, there were paintings covering up the walls of the room they had entered into. Descriptions underneath ranged from the specific ( _Lily in the Alley Covered in Clover_ , oil on canvas, 28 cm x 36 cm) to vague ( _Aftermath_ ). However, when they had walked through a door shaped like a frame sinking into the floor, they began to see even stranger depictions.

“Nakanohara?” Joker asked, walking up to touch the painting.

Upon inspection, Yusuke agreed with him, even if he did screw up his face at the portrait. “He doesn’t have a mole there,” was all he had to say.

As they moved further through the room, it became evident that every single painting displayed there was of one of Madarame’s former students.

Eventually, they came to one of Yusuke.

The boy in question had grown more silent as they had inspected each portrait – he had some brief memory to impart about each one, but the anecdotes had shortened over time – and when he saw his own face in the gallery of students, he sighed.

“I knew you were a vile man, Sensei,” he spoke to the painting. “But seeing all of us as merely _your_ works of art when you stole ours for your own benefit?” The edge on his voice teetered dangerously as his still-broken nails slashed at his own image.

“For this, you are unforgivable.”

Before Joker and the others, Yusuke began to glow in a faint blue light that only seemed to explode into a brighter flame as he bent over in pain, brutally clawed at his own face, and then grew costumed in a high collared black jumpsuit with puffy sleeves, a striped belt around his waist, and a kitsune mask that looked identical to the one his shadow had worn just before exited his Palace.

“Come, Goemon!”

A persona with a billowing set of robes as if he was pulled from an _ukiyo-e_ painting, a massive pompadour, and a pipe in his hand floated next to Yusuke then, his gaze serious if not impassive.

Yusuke turned to meet them and, instead of the fierce anger he had felt bloom in himself when he awakened his own persona, Joker could only see a bone-deep sadness in Yusuke’s eyes behind his mask.

“At one point, I thought of him as my father,” Yusuke told them. “My mother died when I was very young and, because we lived with him at the time, he continued to raise me. I had held onto some hope that it was because…” he looked away and shook his head. “But now, because of you all, I have the chance to _make_ him redeem himself.” The weariness left Yusuke at once and a cold fire burned in his eyes, then. He held up a gloved hand and balled it tightly into a fist.

“I had closed my eyes to the truth and sullied my own aesthetics in the vain hope that I would be able to understand him. No more. Pursuing art for its own sake, healing rather than harming others through art… That is a much higher purpose for life than this imposter of a man could ever hope to attain.”

Joker extended his hand to Yusuke. “You better not run away now.”

Yusuke clapped his own hand into Joker’s grasp. “The same goes to you.”

 

*

 

The five of them snuck down a flight of stairs and (after lifting a few trinkets from the displays on either side of the staircase) found themselves in the massive entryway the shadows were shoving each other out of the way to come inside through.

Luckily, a pamphlet on the front desk had a map of the Palace, so even though it wasn’t complete, they weren’t flying blind like last time.

When they followed the winding path behind the information center, the thieves were faced with an oversized golden statue that seemed to have humanoid figures bound up in a whirlwind.

Joker glanced over the description which, in part, read, “ _these individuals must offer their ideas to the director for the rest of their lives_ ” and he sneered.

“The bastard made a sculpture to honor his stealing?” Skull sounded furious and incredulous at once.

“Ultimately, it is unsurprising,” Yusuke shrugged. “I am unsure if people would have stopped coming to see his art even if they knew it was plagiarized.”

“Don’t worry,” Joker reassured them. “In changing his heart, we’ll also be realigning some of his _values_.”

Surrounding the statue was a ramp on either side, and almost nestled at the top of the ramp was a door. Various arrows and locked doors seemed to try and dictate which way they went from there but, as they were thieves, Joker led them through whichever way seemed most convenient as per the map.

“Even the security is pretty easy to avoid,” Panther whispered as they huddled behind one raised panel in the floor that protected them from the guards’ view. “So long as we can sneak around like this, it should be smooth sailing.”

“You’re right, but let’s not get cocky,” Mona added. “No need to go around messing with things that look like they’re set-ups, right?”

When they reached the end of one corridor, Joker held up an arm to stop the others before they could continue. “Infrared,” he spoke with a hint of amusement and, after fiddling with the sensor attached to the wall for a second, waved them on as per usual.

“Good goin’, man!” Skull clapped Joker on the back, all smiles. “Seems like they at least had a plan to slow us down.”

“I’ve just realized something,” Yusuke said, pointing to himself and looking a little lost.

They waited for a moment in silence, assuming it was some sort of insight into Madarame’s thought process that could help them infiltrate the Palace more effectively.

“I don’t have a nickname,” he finished.

Another noiseless beat passed.

Panther’s eye twitched. “Is that it?”

“Dude, you really gotta learn to read the room,” Skull laughed.

“No, you’re right,” Joker nodded. “Madarame actually knows you. If we go around saying your name in what’s essentially his mind, it could get ugly.”

Yusuke puffed out his chest a smidge as though he were proud.

Skull rested his hands behind his head. “So, Inari works, right?”

“The god from folklore?” Panther asked. “I don’t know…”

“What about Da Vinci?” Yusuke said excitedly.

“Did you bring this up just to talk about that?” Mona narrowed his eyes.

Joker paused a second, then said firmly, “Fox.”

“Works for me,” Panther said. “Another animal name!”

“I still like Inari,” Skull pouted, but he shrugged and agreed anyway.

“If that will get this over with,” Mona nodded.

“Wait,” Fox said, holding out his hands. “I’m not sure if that’s the most fitting name.”

“Sorry, Fox,” Joker smiled a little weakly. “You’ve been outvoted.”

“Curse this foul mask.”

Fox staggered behind them for a little while after that.

 

*

 

“This feels like a safe room,” Mona looked up at Joker for confirmation.

He opened the door rather than respond and, true to the sensation it exerted, the room warbled with the distortion that accompanied safe rooms.

“We can take a break if we need to,” Joker glanced especially at Fox. “We have until the fifth of June to take Madarame’s treasure while the exhibit is in town.”

Fox stood up from his leaning position on the table in the room. “Please, don’t stop on my account. I have plenty of fighting spirit left in me.”

As they continued winding around seemingly endless hallways covered in nearly indistinguishable paintings, they had plenty of opportunities for their new member to try out battling.

It appeared that Goemon, the persona that answered Fox’s call, could employ both ice skills and physical attacks. Whether it was simply having another person on the team or if the duo really were as strong as they appeared, Joker couldn’t help but feel grateful for his gamble on Fox going so smoothly.

Joker skillfully nabbed up a handful of new persona to add to his arsenal and, if Fox’s wide-eyed, slack-jawed stare meant anything, it looked just as impressive as it felt to be able to control any number of skills that he wanted.

Occasionally, they found shortcuts through the museum for the next time the infiltrated; when they saw that a door was locked from one side, the group managed to trek their way along the circuitous route to its other end and open it from that side instead.

“Why do you keep taking the trinkets you find flung all around here?” Fox whispered as he and Joker looked around one corner.

Joker explained, “They show up in our world, too, and I have a connection that will buy almost anything.”

“I see,” Fox noted.

“Don’t worry,” Mona grinned sideways up at Fox. “Joker’s safe with me around him all the time. Plus, the guy we’re using to fence all of it risks his own safety if he double-crosses us.”

Fox made a noise of understanding. “I’m sure he knows that, as well.”

In time, the thieves ascended to another level of the Palace’s museum and came across a massive vase in an otherwise unguarded, open room.

“This is obviously a trap,” Panther murmured.

“But it’s so shiny,” Mona nearly drooled, his paws stretching out for the treasure.

“Oh, no you don’t,” Skull nabbed the feline and carried him, despite the cat’s protests, to the other end of the room.

However, before they left the trapped space entirely, Panther pointed to a display case that seemed the perfect height to jump onto. “Could we use that to get into the ventilation system or something? There was that passcode protected room a while back, right?”

“Good thinking,” Fox raised his eyebrows. “However, our map has no markings to indicate how we should proceed through the air ducts.”

“We can split up,” Joker agreed. “We can take different routes to see which leads to the room. If none of them do, we’ll keep looking on foot like we have been.”

“No need,” Mona thumped his chest a couple of times. “I can sneak much faster through smaller places than any of you. Just lemme at it, Joker!”

“Will do. We’ll backtrack to the room itself and wait outside the door until you get there. If we overhear the password on the way, we’ll go ahead and input it.”

“Don’t act like an idiot and get caught in something obvious, okay?” Skull said as they walked away from their partner.

“I could say the same to you!” Mona hissed and wriggled himself into the air vents.

 

*

 

“There’s just a number pad,” Mona mewled from the other side of the glass. “What do you think it could be?”

“28008,” Skull said without thinking.

“Shut up,” Panther rolled her eyes.

“Try 07734,” Joker suggested.

“Where are you possibly pulling these strings of numbers from?” Fox asked with a hand on his hip.

“Did you never write messages to people on your calculator in middle school?” Panther replied. “Because that’s all they’re pulling from now.”

“I’m afraid I have attended primarily fine arts-centered schools,” Fox answered. “Math has never been a top concern of mine.”

“I’m trying Joker’s,” Mona interrupted. “You all should be able to enter if it’s right.”

A moment passed and the door in front of them doesn’t budge.

“The computer said it’s correct, though?” Mona moaned.

“Try opening the door from the inside, then,” Joker proposed. “It’s possible that password works somewhere else further on than we’ve seen.”

“Good point,” Mona hopped off of the seat he was in and opened the door to the outside.

“Then let’s keep goin’!” Skull cried and charged ahead of the rest of the group.

 

*

 

A thick electrical fence appeared over the exits on every side of them, trapping them inside. In the same instant, shadows erupted from the floor in an explosion of black and fuzzy outlines.

“Security,” Mona whined.

“We’ll just have to take them out, then,” Joker smirked.

Each thief went after a separate shadow, ripped off its mask, and then tore their own off. A cacophony of sound clattered through the room as they each summoned their own personas.

“Goemon, come!”

“Let’s go, Carmen!”

“Captain Kidd, we’re up!”

“Zorro!”

“Come forth, Arsene!”

After only a few tense moments, the proverbial smoke cleared from the room and, once the treasure each shadow dropped had been retrieved, Joker found himself directing the others to inspect the mechanisms creating the barrier.

“Maybe this is where the password goes,” Mona suggested, peering around Joker’s leg when he couldn’t reach the keypad himself.

After just a second of panic, the indicator light on the machine turned from red to green. There was a collective sigh of relief once the electrical field collapsed around them.

“Let us continue,” Fox suggested, running through the doorway in front of them.

When they rounded the next corner, however, they were blocked off from going any further in by a set of sliding doors with a bamboo motif.

“Maybe it’s as simple as it looks.” Panther touched one of the doors that appeared closed and, luckily, the rest of them slid open all in unison.

“That seemed _too_ easy,” Skull scowled.

Beyond that, however, lay another set of doors.

“That has the same design as the room Madarame always locked in the atelier,” Fox commented, surprised. “How odd.”

It opened from the other side, the Palace shaking as its hinges swung out. From behind it stepped a chimera of a shadow with a lion’s body, a snake’s tail, and a sunken face with glowing eyes.

“You Phantom Thieves are here to cause trouble,” it rumbled, lunging at them.

Fox and Skull made eye contact and together, they returned the attack full force, the strength of their combined persona enough to make the shadow fall back limply into the nothingness it had come from in the first place.

“Alright!” Skull whooped, high fiving Fox. “Nice tackle there.”

Fox’s smile was almost serene. “I could say the same to you.”

“How foolish,” another voice bellowed from further on in.

“Excuse you?” Skull ran towards the sound, the rest following behind if for no other reason than to keep him out of trouble.

A golden statue depicting Madarame with his arms outstretched towards the sky lay in the center of the otherwise plain room. On both sides of the statue, much like the one that was cast to look like his pupils, there were ramps up to a higher level.

On the left ramp, at the top of the railing, Madarame’s shadow stood decked in a robe of pure gold with extravagant make-up to match. It cried out, “You impudent pups dare to bite at my heels? If you knew what you were up against, you would run from me!”

Fox pushed to the front of the group. Removing his mask without a thought, he yelled in response. “Madarame, your sins have found you out! From now on, you and your ilk will be banished from the art world. So long as I have any strength left in me, I will hunt you and your kind down like the animals you are.”

Joker placed a hand on Fox’s shoulder and beamed at him, confidence and fearlessness all in one look. “He’s right, you know, Madarame. Your days as an artist are over.”

“How dare you say such things, Yusuke! What, do you think these imbeciles will _help_ you? I am the god of the art world. Without me, your work is meaningless.” He slammed a fist down on the railing. “Guards, kill them all! The price for their insolence is death!”

Shadows decked in security guard attire bubbled up out of the floor and readied themselves to strike.

Replacing his mask, Fox pointed squarely at Madarame. “No more will you trade other’s dreams for riches. The body count you have because you barred entry into art will be brought back down to zero.”

Madarame pretended not to hear and placed a cupped hand around his ear. “What was that? I don’t believe I heard you. There was that one girl, after all, who killed herself after leaving my tutelage.” His eyes narrowed to slits. “After all, Yusuke, it seems you can never really erase me.”

The shadows exploded into their true forms – four flying humanoids and another one with strange breathing equipment hanging around his body – and formed a circle around the Phantom Thieves.

“You’re wrong! Come, Goemon!” Fox ripped the mask from his face, his decoratively robed persona bursting forth. “Mabufu!”

When the shards of ice that slashed into all five enemies, four of them fell to the ground, clutching at various parts of their bodies that had been cut open and frozen that way.

Joker couldn’t help the pride that cracked in his voice when he called forth one of his persona, Genbu, that held the same power. With another ice storm building its way into the veins of the majority of their enemies sending them back into nothingness, Joker could at least take a more tactical look at the situation.

The remaining humanoid began staggering towards them, its arms hanging limply at its side.

“Hey, Skull! Catch!” Panther cracked a whip at one of its arms and, using her strength, she flung the lassoed shadow over in Skull’s direction.

With Captain Kidd’s power coursing through him, he swung his club at it as hard as he could and it was knocked back into the statue, vaporizing it instantly.

By the time they looked up from the fight, Madarame’s shadow-self had disappeared back into the further recesses of his museum Palace.

Joker hadn’t stopped thinking about their situation, however. He took stock of the panting, the meaningful glances exchanged, and the way their newcomer looked drained of everything he had.

“There’s a safe room just to the left,” he pointed out, even relieved himself to find something. “Let’s secure that for ourselves and then head out for the day.”

He was met with no complaints.


	8. May 25th

Yusuke felt groggy even well into the afternoon that day. Even though his roommates had left earlier on – citing chores and a movie with friends before waving goodbye – and he should have gotten out of bed then, he remained contemplative beneath his sheets until it was nearly too late to do anything else with the day.

More than anything else, he was exhausted. It was the bone-deep, drag limbs around, roll over and go back to sleep sort of tired that he hadn’t properly felt since the last time he had the flu.

 _Was_ he getting sick?

Or had the strange sights of the day before and awakening a manifestation of his rebellion against society done him in?

He almost chuckled at the thought.

According to his new friends, they had just pulled the darkness out of him, and now there he was deciding the parts of his whole self that he would hold onto, be they good or bad.

Goemon had told him to cast aside the imitative…

And there was certainly a cathartic side to getting into a shouting match with the man who had stolen work from him and countless other children over the years.

However, the more pressing thoughts in his mind had less to do with the fantastical elements of the day before and more with the practical.

Namely, what to do with Akira. He had surely embarrassed the other boy that previous afternoon in the train station when he let his emotions get the best of him. When he pulled Akira into his embrace, the shorter boy had hesitated.

It _was_ strange to touch others like that, Yusuke had to admit. Perhaps he hadn’t grown up with the most loving parental figure, of course, but even under normal circumstances he couldn’t imagine a world where he would be so free as to reach out like that. When he was handed the picture of his mother, the only memory he had of even her existence, he felt compelled to show that strong of a response.

But what was his excuse for leaning in, for sobbing into Akira’s school uniform? What could he say to the prickling feelings in the back of his mind that told him even that felt right? And they _had_. Touching Akira, reaching out for him, and being held by him seemed perfectly within his capabilities.

Nothing would suffice for an answer, though, it seemed.

Akira had given him so much already. It was funny. More than just a stuffed toy, more than the picture of him and his mother, Akira had given him a chance to remake himself.

He was already in so much debt to the other boy’s kindness that it stung.

The looks that Akira gave him – so _full_ of something that it felt as though Yusuke could reach out and touch whatever emotion it was that clouded those gray eyes – made him want to slap paint to the canvas in the most painful way, too.

While he knew he couldn’t distance himself from the others now that he was so indelibly linked to them by their shared vigilantism, the weak part of his heart told him it might be best to try to study Akira from a clinical perspective rather than an emotional one.

What made his leader tick, for example, was indeterminable.

Yusuke took out a sketchpad and began to draw loose figures on the page, hoping to tighten them up into something presentable later on. Maybe if he could distract himself from the confusing person that was Akira, he could better decipher what went on in the boy’s mind.

Unfortunately, once the scantest marks were made on the page, Yusuke felt himself almost tensing up. His brain couldn’t focus, couldn’t choose one path to take. There were so many options, even if he stuck to only drawing those he had seen milling about Shibuya, that it paralyzed him.

He stretched his wrist some to delay the inevitable but, even with his attempting to draw on the sofa in the living room instead, he still couldn’t seem to make anything work.

Everything came back to Madarame’s words in his Palace. Once Yusuke had seen the extent to which everything in his former mentor’s mind was corrupted…

He began to question how much of that influence was felt in his own work, as well.

 

***

 

Akira placed the apron back on the hook and thanked Sojiro for letting him off early.

“Go on, kid,” the older man half-smiled. “Don’t want you getting sappy on me.”

With the chime on the door overhead announcing his departure, Akira stepped out into the backstreets of Yongen-Jaya. Even over the course of a month, he found himself falling in love with the buzz and hum of the different locations around Tokyo.

It was entirely unlike his home town.

Pulling his phone out of his pocket, he breathed a quiet sigh at not having any messages in his inbox waiting for him. For once, he could enjoy a Sunday afternoon all by himself.

He didn’t want to, though.

There was a decent excuse to it now, since Yusuke had become a proper Phantom Thief, but Akira had thoroughly relished the time he had spent getting to know the other boy over the past week. If he wasn’t imagining things, and he liked to hope he wasn’t, there was a connection between the two of them.

Not only did he want to help Yusuke out of the darkness the boy had fallen into, but he also felt that it was part of his duty to change the heart of his demented artistic mentor.

Yusuke had mentioned something when Akira handed him that washed out picture, too. The other boy had no recollection of either of his parents.

Beyond basic sympathies for someone, it made Akira want to protect Yusuke as much as he could. He almost certainly _was_ working up feelings for the taller boy if his train of thought moved in that direction, but how could he not?

Akira stepped into the mostly empty train car and took a seat. Without Morgana tagging along, he could think entirely by himself over the thrum of the wheels screeching against the rails.

Yusuke was attractive – much more so than Akira had expected when Nakanohara’s shadow and Phan site posts suggested he had a little brother – in a way that seemed to defy logic. The boy was lanky, all limbs and long fingers, and had a penchant for dramatic poses. Akira would have assumed that Yusuke was an artist simply by his odd habits. Even the way that he spoke made Yusuke out to be much older than he was. He was different and, above all, interesting.

Despite all this, however, he still struggled with things like identity, belonging, and finding his place alongside the shitty adults that plagued the world.

Akira could find a lot to like about that, particularly when paired with the shouting match Yusuke had so easily entered into with Madarame’s shadow. He spoke about ideals like justice and had his own opinions of how the art world _should_ be, which was more than Akira could say.

He wasn’t sure what he wanted to do with his life; Yusuke seemed more than certain about the direction he was headed in.

All in all, it was hard to dislike Yusuke. He was strange, to be sure, but it was the sort of oddity that drew someone in closer with the magnetism of it.

He wanted to get to know Yusuke more than he already had. He wanted to be able to know, from a glance, exactly what the other boy was thinking. He wanted to figure out precisely what compelled the orphan and upcoming artist to live the way he did.

So, as he exited the train and stepped onto the platform in the middle of Shibuya, he sent out a text.

>> AKIRA(18:06): I know it’s late, but do you wanna hang out?

 

*

 

He was waiting at the smoothie stand when he saw Yusuke approaching from the crowd. The other boy waved politely to acknowledge that he had seen him, too, and soon they were ordering the strange concoction of the day from the adventurous stall owner.

“This looks terrible,” Yusuke said with a sparkle in his eye. It seemed like he was _excited_ for the taste of the awful, green colored drink he had ordered.

Akira’s was a milder color, something in the pink family, and it tasted vaguely fruity.

“Were you right?” he asked as he looked over at the sour expression on Yusuke’s face.

“Quite,” he replied, somehow still enthused. “It’s possible this is the worst combination of flavors I have tried in some time.”

“You knew about this place, too?”

“Occasionally, when I am running late and haven’t had time to eat breakfast, I will stop by and try whatever the cashier suggests. I believe all the workers have discovered this and are now out to see what I will refuse to eat,” he laughed.

Akira smiled back at him.

“The weather is nice today,” Yusuke said after a moment. “I know of a good place to watch people if you would like to go with me.”

“I asked you to hang out, didn’t I?”

“I suppose so,” the taller boy appeared to be thinking hard about something. “At any rate, we will require the train over at that end of the station for this destination,” Yusuke explained and began leading the way.

Akira followed, sipping on his drink and enjoying being able to relax. He noticed a slight limp in Yusuke’s walk, however, and commented on it.

“I believe I am simply sore from yesterday,” Yusuke admitted.

They both took their spots on the train, which was standing room only as the dinnertime mob flocked to the various parts of the city. When they wanted to talk to each other, simply because of the crowd in the car, they had to get much closer than Akira expected he would have been comfortable.

But there was also a sense of coziness, strangely, being pressed up against Yusuke like that.

“Should you have stayed home to rest instead?” Akira asked, tilting his head up to look into Yusuke’s eyes.

“Please, do not worry for my sake,” the other boy shook his head. “Exercising more would be good for me. I often find myself sitting for long periods of time when I work.”

“I know you’re an artist,” Akira changed the subject slightly, “but what exactly do you do?”

Yusuke’s eyes shone. “I work primarily with traditional mediums such as painting and charcoal drawing. However, in the past, I have completed a few projects in ceramics.”

“Really? Could I see your work sometime?”

“Well,” Yusuke looked away, “I suppose. There will be an exhibit at Kosei before summer vacation starts.”

“It’s a fairly well-known art school,” Akira continued, not sure how to deal with Yusuke’s apparent embarrassment over talking about himself. “Is that why you went?”

“To some extent, yes. I do want to enter the art world at some point. However, upon seeing how truly corrupt that selection of humanity is…” He trailed off. “There are a number of obstacles yet in my way.”

“But still, you know what you want to do,” Akira pointed out.

The train came to a stop and, after exiting the station, Akira found himself in a familiar place.

“Inokashira,” he glanced up at Yusuke. “It’s a beautiful park.”

“So, you have been here before?” Yusuke almost looked disappointed.

“Yeah, Ann and I came here once just a little while ago.”

“Oh,” the other boy nodded. Did he sound a little sad, there, too?

 

***

 

“What’s wrong, Yusuke?” Akira asked.

 _You came here with your girlfriend_ , Yusuke almost found himself saying. “Nothing is the matter,” he sighed. “Shall we sit on one of the benches around the lake and finish our drinks?”

“Sure,” Akira replied, giving him a strange look. What was he trying to do, read Yusuke’s mind?

 The notion was absurd.

Things were quiet for a minute, the only noise the ducks quacking as the other visitors fed them pieces of food from their own picnics.

“I feel conflicted,” Yusuke said after a while.

“About?”

“My artwork. It seems as though, because of Madarame’s influence, I might become as tainted as him.”

“I doubt it,” Akira replied.

“And why is that?”

“Because you made a promise to Goemon, right? And, in turn, the rest of us too.”

“Yes…”

“You said that you would undo the damage Madarame’s done. I think you can.”

Yusuke blinked slowly. “What would give you the impression that I could actually accomplish that?”

“It’s just a feeling you give off,” Akira shrugged. “I think as long as you keep at it, you can become whatever you want to.”

“You might be just as eccentric as I am,” Yusuke almost found himself laughing, his eyes sparkling with something like satisfaction. “I am more a stranger than not to you and yet, you would say such things.”

“It’s not _strange_ ,” Akira did laugh, then, “it’s confidence. You have a lot of it.”

“Perhaps, but is it not wrong to be entirely self-assured?”

“Not if it’s merited.” At this, Akira stood up and threw his cup in the trash can nearby. “Besides, we’re still young. You have plenty of time to erase Madarame’s influence on you, even if it was a wholly bad thing.”

Yusuke put his hand on his heart and looked fondly at the other boy. “Somehow, speaking with you has eased my heart. Besides the exhibit at my school, there is a contest I plan to enter into. Might I… borrow you on another occasion if the need arises?”

“Any time you need me, just text me.”

“You are most appreciated, Akira.”

 

*

 

That evening, back at the apartment with Takahashi-san and Nakanohara, Yusuke sat down once more to sketch out some sort of composition that he could possibly use for the contest he had seen fliers for plastered around his school.

When he set his pencil to paper, the one word that rang through his mind like an echo on the mountains was the word _desire_.


	9. May 26th

When he woke up that morning to a barrage of messages, something about the situation felt as though he had been with these people much longer than two weeks. Yusuke had received a text from Akira and two others – assumedly Ann and Ryuji, whose phone numbers he had forgotten to ask for – asking about going to Madarame’s Palace that afternoon.

He had no objection to the idea.

>> YUSUKE (6:34): I see no reason why we should dawdle any longer, no.

<< ???(6:34): Man, you type just how you talk

<< ???(6:35) Ryuji, behave, it’s too early for you to be an ass

<< AKIRA(6:37): It’s a plan, then

<< AKIRA(6:37): After school, everyone head to the accessway in Shibuya across from the exhibit hall

Yusuke could piece together who was who simply based on the way they texted. He supposed Ryuji’s comment _was_ correct, even though it was strange of him to say something that applied so definitely to himself as well.

<< RYUJI(6:39): You think we could get to the treasure room by tonight?

<< ANN(6:40): I’d hope we’re at least more than halfway there ;;

>> YUSUKE(6:41): I assume this is more jargon I will simply have to learn, yes?

<< AKIRA(6:42): Treasure room = where the person’s treasure = most valued thing is in their Palace

<< AKIRA(6:43): We send out actual calling cards posted all over the place when we’re ready for their treasure to manifest since it puts them on high alert

<< AKIRA(6:44): Ryuji made the last one, but now that we have an actual artist, would you mind drawing up something when the time comes?

>> YUSUKE(6:45): I would be honored. I do not remember seeing any cards around me, however, and you said that I was your previous target.

<< AKIRA(6:45): You were a different case – for some reason, your shadow gave up quicker

>> YUSUKE(6:46): How peculiar!

<< RYUJI(6:46): Fuck off, my design was sublime n shit

<< ANN(6:47): ◔_◔

 

*

 

They had been jumping in and out of paintings of different sorts of landscapes for what felt like hours. Yusuke even, by that point in time, had checked out from examining the artistic quality that the heart could display; he just wanted to be _done_ with Madarame.

Justice, rebellion… it was all necessary because the world had decided they didn’t deserve to be a part of it.

If Madarame had his way, none of his former pupils would have been able to enter into the world of art. They would have either quit on their own ( _lost connection with their passion_ , he surely would have explained it away as) or been shoved out of the scene ( _they simply didn’t have the guts required to make it_ ).

Yusuke would have _none_ of it.

Walking through a manifestation of the greed that lay in his former sensei’s heart only proved to him how strong his will had to be in facing that man down. Without the determination to go on and the other thieves standing by his side, he easily could have lost himself in the dark room in Madarame’s atelier. Even earlier than that, if Nakanohara and Takahashi-san had not rescued him as well.

Actually, considering that he had a Palace of his own, he _did_ lose something of himself to Madarame’s wickedness. Considering that point, Yusuke felt disgusted by his previous actions. Not only had he built something as shameful as a distorted view of himself and the world, but he also let it fester within him and tried to push away the only people whose actions could have changed him.

But that was all behind him now.

So, despite the grind it was to continue keeping pace with everyone, Yusuke couldn’t let himself grow weary. He had both his future and the future of the other pupils on his back, even more so the lives his and their art would touch.

He wouldn’t – no, couldn’t – let anyone down.

 

*

 

When they finally made their way through the last painting in the series of gaudy, attached landscapes, Yusuke could feel the relief hit each of them in waves.

“We’re not out of the woods yet,” Joker huffed, looking at their surroundings.

Skull pulled at his hair. “What even _is_ this room?”

Like before, paintings lined the walls in neat rows, but this time, the stairs curved in and around each other in an infinite loop.

“Ah, how derivative,” Yusuke scoffed. “Escher was far cleverer than this.”

“Who?” Skull whipped his head around to stare at Yusuke. “Fox, you know what this is about?”

“I study art,” Yusuke answered simply. “M.C. Escher developed works that had seemingly inescapable structures. In my opinion, he only demonstrated that he felt as trapped as the people who would have inhabited his worlds would have.”

“So what do we do?” Panther placed a hand on her hip, impatient.

“Ignore it,” Yusuke said with a flourish. “we are no longer trapped like this, correct? Follow me,” he smirked wildly, jumping straight into the space between the repetitive staircases.

Once they had fallen onto the bottom level, the staircase’s illusion broken, Mona scurried over to one of the walls.

On it, hung _Sayuri_.

“Ah,” Yusuke sucked in a breath. “She truly is a masterpiece.”

“I wonder why she looks so sad,” Panther mused.

“Look,” Joker pointed in another direction. “There’s another copy over there. It – it doesn’t look quite right.”

“An excellent eye,” Yusuke agreed. “While it still is lovely, some of the appeal is lost due to the signature someone has placed on it.”

The copies, when followed through and jumped into like the landscapes before them, led the thieves to a doorway with golden light pouring out from behind it.

“Seems pretty straightforward to me,” Skull grinned. “Let’s go!”

The room they opened the door into was another security office.

Mona wailed, “Another stupid password to crack?”

“No,” Joker corrected, “just an open terminal with a few commands to input. Let’s go ahead and turn off the security from here.”

“Thank god,” Panther groaned. “I’m sick of this place.”

“I agree completely,” Yusuke sighed.

The sliding electronic doors on the other side of the room opened and, with a few strokes on the keyboard, Joker had disabled the lasers along the sides of the walls, the security cameras, and the shutters that blocked entry into certain rooms.

“Let’s keep going, we’re almost there,” Joker reassured them. “I can feel it.”

True to his word, upon exit, there was another room with a ramp that led directly up into where the treasure lay. At the moment it was a formless, glowing ball of energy, but Mona reassured Yusuke that it would turn into Madarame’s greatest treasure once they had sent the calling card.

“How odd,” Yusuke looked around. “I would have anticipated more resistance to our being here, then.”

“Spoke too soon,” Panther cried, pointing out the mob of shadows coming their way. “Carmen, let’s roast these bastards!”

“Don’t leave me out of the fun!” Skull ripped his mask from his face and, shouting a command to Captain Kidd, he joined his electricity in with Panther’s fire to create the nastiest sizzle of shadowy flesh Yusuke had yet to hear.

Or smell, for that matter.

When the air dried out around them suddenly, Skull still had a grin from ear to ear. He simply gave Yusuke and Joker a knowing glance before another clap of thunder slammed lightning down on the next closest enemies.

“I learned that in science,” he boasted.

“When, in middle school?” Panther giggled, placing her whip back at her side.

“Stay focused,” Joker tried, but they were already at it.

“I’ll handle this one,” Mona cried, using Zorro to slash at the few remaining attackers with sharp bursts of wind.

Yusuke folded his arms and glanced at Joker. “Remind me why we’re here again?”

Joker looked like he suppressed a smile then and patted Yusuke on the shoulder. “I couldn’t tell you.” He called to the others and, with his commanding voice, said, “There’s a room over this way I want us to check out.”

Upon inspection, the thieves could see through the glass in that room directly to the treasure that lay below. Between a hook hanging on a mechanism in the middle of the ceiling, a switch that looked like it controlled the entire power grid for that section of the Palace, and the window they were staring through, they hatched a plan for their next escapade.

“I vote Mona as bait,” Skull cheered.

 

*

 

Back in the streets of Shibuya, the four teenagers and Morgana spoke in low, hushed tones about the Palace.

“I didn’t expect to finish that quickly,” Ann noted, taking in the sights around her.

“Me neither,” Ryuji grinned. “Guess havin’ another person around really helped.”

“I doubt I contributed that much,” Yusuke said sheepishly.

“Are you still okay for coming up with the calling card?” asked Akira, his eyes staying focused on Yusuke the whole time.

“And what am I, then?” Ryuji barked.

“We can make it a collaborative effort,” Yusuke reassured him. “You are more than welcome to come over to the apartment I live in to work on it.”

“Wait, really?”

“Of course.” Yusuke glanced around at the four others. “We are friends, yes? I interpreted us all having each other’s cell numbers as such. Was I incorrect?”

“No,” Akira gave a small, reassuring smile. “Ryuji’s more surprised that you’d work with him, that’s all.”

“Yeah, man!” Ryuji held his fists up just as high as his chest. “I’m pumped. We’ll make something totally awesome.”

“We used a lot of newspapers last time to make the card look,” Ann paused a second, “creepy, I guess. Are we sticking with that?”

“Might as well,” Morgana meowed. “It’s our brand now, or something.”

“If you give us the address, we can get supplies and then meet up at your place,” Akira said. “Does that work with everyone?”

“Sure,” Ann agreed. “We might as well all work on the wording together and let those two figure out the look.”

 

***

 

“Are you nervous about going to his place?” Ann raised an eyebrow suggestively as she walked behind them.

“I’m sure I have no idea what you mean,” Akira sighed.

Ryuji was oddly quiet as they entered the apartment complex and walked up several flights of stairs. Akira made a mental note to ask him what was wrong later.

“Come on,” she said, dragging out the last syllable. “You meet some guy that needs your help – you’re the type to like lost causes,” Ann gestured with her hand in some way that was supposed to convey absolute surety. “And then he turns out to be some like, hurting artist type or something with Daddy issues.”

“You know we don’t say that _word_ ,” Ryuji finally groaned, his voice coming from the back of his throat as he tilted his head back.

“Alright, fine, he’s got ‘parental problems,’ happy?”

“ _Yes_.”

“You’re all weird,” Morgana mewled from the school bag Akira carried.

“No,” Akira shook his head. “It’s not like that. I _do_ like helping people, but I don’t like Yusuke because he needs me or something weird like that. I like him because — ” he stopped midsentence, face flushing over.

“So, you do like him!” Ann screamed, triumphant and doing some terrible dance in celebration.

Akira sighed deeply and stopped moving up the steps. He turned around so he could face the blondes. “I like Yusuke because he’s weird and he doesn’t care about people’s perception of him. He wouldn’t have cared about the labels that got put on me when I transferred. It’s,” he faced the other way and took several steps in between speaking, “nice.”

“So which one of us is going to give him the ‘all men are pigs’ speech?” Ryuji asked, the teasing edge thick in his voice.

Ann snickered through a closed mouth. “If someone tells me that Yusuke is even remotely a sexual being, I’ll give up desserts for a month.”

“The less we talk about someone in our group’s _preferences_ ,” Morgana hissed, “the better mood I’ll be in.”

“Crabby kitty,” Ann giggled. “Oh, Akira, isn’t this the floor?”

Akira checked the message on his phone and, sure enough, they had finally come to the correct place. “He’s just down that way, apparently,” he said, and they knocked on the door with the proper numbering.

Yusuke opened it just a crack and smiled. “I hope that you all had a safe trip,” he said as he ushered them in.

When Akira saw that there appeared to be only one bedroom for the three people he heard were living there, the part of him that _did_ just want to spoil Yusuke started burning white hot in his gut.

“We brought newspapers!” Ann announced, holding up the full shopping bag.

 

*

 

“I do like the idea of incorporating Joker’s mask into the design,” Yusuke mused, one hand on his chin. “Perhaps, if we placed it to the bottom of the top hat instead…”

He trailed off and began roughing out a couple of ideas.

Ryuji had his jaw on the floor the whole time.

If Akira didn’t know any better, he would have thought of Ryuji as competition starting then. _Wait_. Not competition, because Yusuke could choose whoever he wanted.

And if Akira was going to consider anyone a threat to himself being the choice Yusuke made, Akira figured it _would_ be himself. In all likelihood, Yusuke was straight. Most people were, after all, and statistics were already skewed since both he and Ann weren’t and they were all friends.

When Akira tried to picture Yusuke with a girl, on the other hand, something didn’t seem quite right.

Maybe it was the hopeful side of him.

“And then, you could add like, a flame coming out of the mask!” Ryuji’s eyes were as wide as dinner plates and he was pumping his fists in the air with every word.

Yusuke chuckled, but he did add some detail to the sketch that Akira couldn’t see from his vantage point.

“I think it would look best in red,” Yusuke muttered to himself. “That way, in comparison to the newsprint, it would stand out. Everyone would know that it was the Phantom Thieves who sent it.” He glanced Akira’s way. “What do you think, Leader?”

Ann sent Akia a very purposeful gaze.

“We could use red paper in the background, too,” he shrugged, not entirely sure why he was asked to give input.

“Of course!” Yusuke slammed a hand down on the table they were working on. “Let me go find some,” he said, waving as he moved into the other room.

Ann’s stare only felt heavier, then.

He swallowed.

“This is gonna look incredible, guys,” Ryuji grinned like a little kid. As he looked between Ann and Akira, however, his expression turned into a concentrated frown. “Leave the guy alone, Takamaki,” he said, stressing her last name.

“What’s it to you, _Sakamoto_? I’m just calling it like I see it.”

“Sure, but you’re embarrassing him,” Ryuji sputtered, shaking his hands as if he was saying the most obvious thing.

Ann stuck her tongue out at him and went back to pointedly, mischievously, glancing at Akira.

Yusuke walked in with a mound of red construction paper. For some reason Akira couldn’t put his finger on, Yusuke’s face fell when he saw the four of them sitting around the table.

 

***

 

Yusuke walked into the kitchen, closing the bedroom door as unobtrusively as he could. With his red paper in hand, he had been prepared to finish the design for the logo and the card and make as many as he could help with in the time they had left.

The plan was for Morgana to sneak out with a bag of them that night and scatter them all over the busiest intersection in Shibuya.

What Yusuke wasn’t ready for, however, was to see the obvious look of fondness on Ann’s face being directed at Akira.

He cleared his throat a little, frustrated that his suspicion from when he and Akira went to Inokashira was true, and sat back down to continue working on the calling cards.

Just because he had been right about Akira being straight didn’t mean that the plan had to suffer.

 

*

 

Late that night, when Yusuke should have already been asleep, he felt his phone vibrate next to him in bed. Looking at the screen, he saw a message from Ryuji.

<< RYUJI(02:27): Forgot to tell you this earlier with all the excitement, but we live in the same apartment building

<< RYUJI(02:27): Weird, huh?

<< RYUJI(02:27): I’m a couple floors down if you ever wanna drop by

<< RYUJI(02:28): It’s just me and my mom, so don’t feel weird about it

A part of him that he didn’t care to admit existed had hoped it was another invitation from Akira to see him the next day. Instead of thinking about hopeful impossibilities, he decided to be thankful for his friends.

>> YUSUKE(02:29): Thank you for the invitation; I enjoyed working together with all of you tonight.

He closed his eyes, a little unsteady and a pinch sad, and fell asleep.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I didn't have Yusuke go by Fox in the sections from his perspective this time because a) he doesn't like his name in canon and b) he's still not used to the idea of having an alter-ego. 
> 
> Thanks for making it this far, everyone! Only a little longer to go ;;


	10. May 27th

Upon discovering that the art world’s current focus, its idol and its center, thought of himself as an emperor, Yusuke could only remark upon how peculiar a turn his life had taken.

Honestly, learning from that man that he killed Yusuke’s mother by his own negligence was a bigger shock.

“She had a weak heart,” Madarame, bedecked in the golden robes of his shadow form, had merely shrugged it off. “When she happened to have a seizure one day, all I did was not call an ambulance. And who could blame me, either? She had just completed a masterpiece _and_ her son was already showing signs that he could one day do the same for me.”

From there, the old man burst into paintings bearing components from his own face that seemed to batter on endlessly, reflecting and taking any hit the thieves could dish out just as well or better.

It seemed like they were goners for a second, there.

“You know, that painting she made was the one that made me rich as the devil himself,” Madarame said, re-formed and slightly hunched over. “That _Sayuri_ … She’ll never know what a favor she did to me by dying!”

And then, Yusuke lost all sense of self to the wholly encompassing fury that overtook him. He knew the hits he was handing out were too much, but he threw them anyway. Goemon would give him a cautious look, Joker a worried glance, but Yusuke could only feel the cold satisfaction that came in ripping the work of art Madarame thought he was apart.

That sniveling bastard had the audacity to continue on.

“No one cares for true art these days, Yusuke! All they want are recognizable brands, and everyone requires money to survive. Everything I did, I did it to keep myself from returning to the life of a poor artist, struggling in the world. You understand, don’t you, Yusuke?”

At the end of it, breathing ragged and his body protesting with every step, the treasure that old man held onto so dearly revealed itself.

 _Sayuri_ , beauty incarnate, but without that obfuscating mist that had always hung around in the bottom of her painting. In its place, an infant wrapped snugly in a blanket lay in the arms of the woman.

Combined with the exhaustion of being targeted more than the others and the effort he had given, the sight itself made him feel tears roll down his face in streams unasked for and uncontrollable.

He was sure that he looked a complete and utter fool as they rushed, treasure in hand, out of the crumbling Palace.

Even back in the accessway in Shibuya, where they could see the several hundred calling cards they had painstakingly made blanketing the ground like a red snow, he could not feel remorse for the way he had lashed out: against both Madarame for his sins and himself for trusting that the old man could ever be redeemed.

He deserved to rot.

Yusuke pulled his knees to his chest and buried his face in the ball he was readily turning into. The art world was corrupt; his mother died from negligence; he had been used almost all his life for the sake of one man’s greed.

But there was a hand on his shoulder, and then two, and then another and a paw added themselves to the mix.

Even in the heat of his own panicked huddle, he could feel the warmth and the strength of their devotion to each other. To him. When he looked up, at last, he saw the same tears that stung his eyes mirrored in theirs, too.

And one hand didn’t let go when the others went their own way out of necessity. One hand escorted him, politely, through the underground station to his own apartment. That hand helped him gather his things, typed the text message he couldn’t send on his own, pulled him upstairs into the attic of Leblanc with the promise of curry come closing time.

One hand only, at the last moment, let go of him when he found sleep on the futon next to Morgana and that hand’s owner.

He had forgotten what it meant to be cherished, but that one boy simply would not leave him be.

One hand.

 

***

 

Akira felt as though, despite telling himself he wouldn’t, he crossed yet another boundary. Yusuke had run himself ragged in the fight and had taken the brunt of the paintings’ hits more than the rest of them; he had absolutely exhausted everything he had in those few moments.

It scared Akira.

Not the rage, not the desperation. He understood those well and had felt them himself so many times in the past few months that he could easily wave them off. Instead, it was Yusuke’s plain-faced desire to drain himself entirely so that Madarame would be removed from the world.

If he wasn’t careful, he could have caused a mental shutdown instead of simply stealing the old man’s treasure.

Making Yusuke, who upon seeing his mother’s handiwork sobbed violently in public, into a killer?

Akira would have no part in it.

That was why he had to bring Yusuke back to Leblanc, to where he could painstakingly unwrap all of the layers of the artist until only the person who had loved art enough to make conversation with a stranger on the train remained. Even if Yusuke had his own little family, Akira was a selfish guy.

He wanted the place Yusuke ran to be with him, not only with them.

The taller boy had been in a stupor almost the entire time they gathered his things up and wrote messages to his somewhat-siblings. Even on the train rides, when they couldn’t find a seat and had to stand, Akira felt uncomfortable letting go and held them both up by the sheer force of his will.

(He thought, in that moment, that he should do more pull-ups with Ryuji for times like this.)

Yusuke, who had gone from feeling so mixed up in the world that he formed a Palace, had unlocked a means of bringing justice onto the society that had found him unworthy to live in it. All in the same week.

Akira felt _fiercely_ proud of the progress Yusuke had made and was still making.

But it was inappropriate, Akira knew, to cling so desperately to someone who hadn’t asked it of you.

Morgana had given him a compassionate glance when he had placed Yusuke onto the futon without another word. He had been patient, almost saintly, when Akira helped Yusuke to eat one bowl of curry, and then another. He gave no complaints when, without hesitation, Akira helped Yusuke to change into the set of pajamas he had packed for the other boy.

Until Akira lay awake staring at Yusuke’s sleeping face, in fact, he had been the perfect house cat.

“You know,” Morgana said with a yawn, “that he’s going to wake up confused.”

“I do,” Akira whispered back.

“What’s your contingency plan for him freaking out?” The cat asked.

“I don’t really have one,” he admitted.

“You know that I’ll support you no matter what, though, right?”

Akira could feel the smile blooming on his own face. “Thank you, Mona.”

The cat returned the expression. “Always, Joker.”

“I’m worried about him.”

“I know.”

“He won’t react well to Madarame admitting everything, I don’t think.”

“He’s a private person,” Morgana twitched his nose. “There’s nothing enjoyable about having your personal business made public.”

“He – he said he doesn’t have friends at school. That they call him names.”

“Most of your school calls you names, too, Akira.”

Yusuke shifted in his sleep, ever so slightly, but it moved his hand to rest next to Akira’s head.

“But I have you, Ann, and Ryuji. Mishima, too.” He thought for a moment. “Even Kawakami is on our side, I think.”

Morgana shut his eyes and tucked his head into his curled-up front paws. “Then you’ll just have to be on his side.”

Akira turned his head so that he could watch Yusuke again. The sleeping boy’s fingernails were even growing back, at least, so there was progress to be seen there, as well.

Ahh, but he was being a nuisance to Yusuke with his babying, wasn’t he? They hadn’t known each other for long, and Yusuke was probably straight, so waking up in another man’s bed really _would_ require a thorough explanation.

He would say something like he was worried Yusuke would stop breathing, or that he couldn’t sleep well on the sofa but couldn’t expect Yusuke to, either. That should work, right? Akira looked back at the sleeping figure.

Yusuke had such long eyelashes —

What _was_ Akira thinking? He had no hope of getting with the other boy and, even with Morgana and his other friends’ support, it would still hurt if he kept throwing himself in these sorts of situations. It was unwise at best and a total dick move towards himself at worst.

“What’re we gonna do, Morgana?” Akira asked, suddenly feeling very small.

“About what?”

“I think I might love him,” he whispered as softly as possible.

The moon shone in through the big window just next to Akira’s futon, illuminating the entire little attic space with its cool, pale light. Even the dust motes that danced lazily in the late spring warmth seemed to be encircling them, enshrouding them in this one moment in time.

Yusuke’s face was perfect, asleep and calm and measured, and his breathing was deep. Even when he made a noise of surprise in his sleep, or mumbled something about a new flavor of ramen, he was entirely, utterly wonderful.

The t-shirt that he had picked out in his shellshock complemented his skin, the dark emerald tone in it bringing out the tiniest of freckles that Akira could just make out on his lower back.

Yusuke, unknowing and unwitting, moved in his sleep once more to put his arm across Akira’s chest in the most heart-wrenching motion of unconscious protectiveness.

The sheets shifted beneath them as Akira, his own mind screaming for him to run, to hide, to not get involved —

Clung a little at Yusuke’s too-big shirt with the emerald stripes.

“I know,” Morgana replied, his own small voice seeming much louder in that little bubble in time.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> My fiancé got home this week so I've been with him. I'll get the rest of this up ASAP, though, so thank you for your patience!!


	11. May 28th

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If you read this chapter before the 6th, you'll need to re-read it. In transferring the unedited version into ao3, it deleted a bulk of the text and I had to re-write it. 
> 
> Thanks for understanding!

The clouds were dark and hazy that morning and, from the moment Yusuke woke up, he was unsure of what exactly would happen next.

Morgana was awake and grooming himself on the windowsill.

“What time is it?” Yusuke asked, the sleep still thick in his voice.

“Time to go back to sleep,” the cat replied after a pause. “It’s four in the morning. Neither of you needs to be awake for a while.”

Either Yusuke’s brain had short-circuited, or when he had slept over at Akira’s (really Sojiro’s) place, he had taken it upon himself to stay in the same bed as the other boy.

He had to cover his mouth to hide the gasp, but the damned cat let out a quiet snicker to let him know he had done a poor job of it.

“You both had a bad day yesterday. I’m surprised either of you made it through that fight if I’m being honest.”

“I only recall things here and there,” Yusuke rolled over to face Morgana, but he regretted it when he recalled that constant, warm presence that had covered the darker spots of his memory like a blanket. Akira had helped him much more than he could repay.

“Madarame, as you knew him, is no more,” was all the cat said.

“I suppose he will make a statement, then.”

“Probably. Are you okay with that?”

“What I feel is… conflicted, to be honest. I had so many memories with him as a child that were what I thought of as normal until just a little while ago. There were things that happened, things that he said, that did not quite add up, however, which I suppose do now.”

“The heart is complicated,” Morgana sighed.

“Indeed.”

The feline perked up an ear. “You do remember the treasure we recovered, right?”

“I am afraid that that part of the day is still rather convoluted in my mind.”

“The real, unedited _Sayuri_.”

Instantly, the image flashed back into Yusuke’s mind. _That_ was why he had begun crying in public again, for the second time in such a short period. It made his ears burn red to remember, but there was something sweet about it, as well.

His friends had surrounded him then, shielded him from any onlooking eyes.

“Yes,” he paused for a long moment. “Mother and child. The longing in her eyes was… for me, I would have to assume.”

“It really is late, Yusuke,” Morgana said, hopping back down to the foot of the futon. “You should go back to bed.”

When he closed his eyes, Yusuke felt the blanket from the bed being pulled up closer to his shoulders. A tiny, furry paw pressed lightly into his back and, without a sound, the culprit likely hopped out of the open window.

“Love is a strong thing, Mother,” Yusuke whispered as he risked peeking an eye open.

Akira’s sleeping form was, wild hair covering most of the drooling boy’s face, something he thought he could never paint accurately enough even if he tried. Perhaps the moment was too sacred to be shared with even a canvas, he mused, unconsciously reaching out with one hand to move Akira’s bangs from his eyes.

The sleeping boy smiled in that moment, and Yusuke’s heart leaped in his chest.

“But I _do_ understand longing.”

 

***

 

Akira woke up to an empty bed, somehow, with no Morgana either. He squinted. He _knew_ he had left the _Sayuri_ painting they recovered from Madarame’s Palace in the same corner of his room that he had placed Yusuke’s things.

However, Yusuke’s bag was still lying there as it should have been, and _Sayuri_ was not.

He smelled coffee so, rustling his hair out of the way to find the glasses he had been wearing since he arrived in Tokyo, he took the stairs two at a time and found Sojiro laughing at something Yusuke had said.

The tall, blue-haired boy was still wearing his pajamas. It was nearly too much for Akira to take this early in the morning.

“There he comes,” Sojiro announced, giving Akira a half-smile. “Sleeping beauty himself.”

“Good morning,” Yusuke commented. “You told me that Boss’s coffee was excellent, but you neglected to mention that he was, in fact, a genius.”

“Where did you find this kid?” Sojiro shook his head. “He’s too good for you.” He gave Akira a look that said something like _don’t mess it up!_ and turned his back to the bar.

When Akira glanced at Yusuke, he had the same flustered expression that Akira could tell he was wearing.

“We’re not — ” he started to say, taking a seat next to Yusuke.

“I know, I know, kids are calling it something different now. Plus, having some old guy congratulate you probably is weird.”

Yusuke glanced at Akira. He looked helpless. “Truly, Boss, we are — ”

“Listen,” Sojiro placed a hot cup of coffee in front of Akira. “Out there? You can pretend all you want. In here? You kids don’t worry about all that.”

In a last-ditch effort, Akira suggested, “But what about your customers?”

“I’ll let you know I’ve had two ladies wearing identical rings pop in here every Sunday morning for the past five years. If anyone wants to get on their case, I show ‘em the door.”

Yusuke looked impressed. “Thank you,” was all he said, but it was so reverential a whisper that Akira almost couldn’t believe it.

When Sojiro went into the kitchen to start work on another batch of curry, Akira leaned into the space between him and Yusuke. He put a hand to his mouth and, in a whisper, asked, “Are you actually gay?”

That same sputtering red appeared on Yusuke’s face. “I – I have never really, well — ”

“I’m bi,” Akira shook his head. “I didn’t know you were gay too, though.”

Yusuke faced forward and took a sip from his drink, still looking just as shocked. “I never have put a label on it,” he answered after a moment.

Akira noticed that he didn’t make eye contact.

“But, I suppose, if I had to choose between men and women — ”

“Yusuke,” Akira placed a hand on his shoulder to try and comfort him. “You don’t have to justify anything like that.” He paused, let his hand fall to his side. “Is that why people call you weird?”

“I have never told anyone,” Yusuke swallowed thickly, only barely turning his head towards Akira.

His eyes fixated on something in the distance, though, and Akira looked in that direction.

Sojiro had turned the television in the upper corner of the café to the news, as usual, and across the screen came the bulletin billed as “hot off the presses!” Madarame, in a much simpler outfit than Akira had recalled seeing him, was saying something.

The TV was muted.

“Yusuke,” Akira said in the same voice he used for Joker. “Listen to me.”

“I want to hear it,” was all he said.

“And you will. Just know that it might be hard,” he pressed his lips together, thinking. “But we’re here for you.”

Yusuke simply nodded, downed the rest of his coffee, and spun off of the bar stool. “I am going to get dressed first if that’s alright with you.”

“Sure. You want it unmuted when you get back down?”

“With another cup of coffee, if it isn’t too much trouble.”

“Of course.”

 

***

 

Yusuke spent the entire time in the privacy of the attic in a tizzy over Akira coming out to him, much less him _coming out to Akira._ If the other boy had meant for them to share the same bed because he had feelings for Yusuke, then…

Then, Yusuke might need to get some air because he had no idea how to deal with reciprocated affection.

What would he do with his hands? While he loved the idea of being affectionate, physical even, with Akira, he simply had never practiced with anyone else. It would be entirely new territory for him.

But no, he couldn’t get his hopes up. He had Madarame’s confession to listen to, at any rate.

 

***

 

Akira had moved to a booth and placed both coffees on one side so that they could watch the news broadcast together. In the back of his mind, he wondered if the sapphic couple sat at the same place, enjoyed themselves in the same space as he and Yusuke were about to.

In the forefront of his mind, however, he was deeply concerned for the boy in question’s reaction to Madarame’s confession. It seemed like it was on a loop, playing repeatedly for anyone who happened to tune in at the wrong time.

“I have made terrible, irreparable mistakes,” Madarame sobbed aloud just as Yusuke stepped back downstairs.

He hurried over and slid into the booth next to Akira without a word.

“Mistakes that I could never hope to own up to. I — I have left down the art world and, more importantly, my students.” His face was screwed up in an almost painful expression, the tears mixing with the mucus pouring from his nose in a disgusting display of emotion.

“How could I possibly apologize to everyone for what I’ve done?” He finally made eye contact with the camera. “I plagiarized every work of mine that mattered. Everything, everything I am is a lie!”

Akira looked to Yusuke to see how he was taking it and noticed, for the first time, that the other boy seemed confidently satisfied.

“He repented, just as you said he would,” Yusuke explained once he noticed Akira’s confusion. “In some small way, I contributed to a great evil in my own realm being vanquished.” He inspected his coffee and a smile played on his lips as though he wasn’t sure whether he was allowed to or not. “Goemon and I fulfilled the most infinitesimal part of our promise.”

“To each other?”

“No, to the arts. It is, admittedly, a selfish wish of mine coming true to see Madarame admitting his shortcomings. For so long I have wanted nothing more than to bring him into alignment with the truth. But,” and his smile was laced with exhaustion, “now I want for even greater things. If I had my way, the entire community would find itself acting according to propriety’s dictation.”

“I know that you can, too,” Akira answered. “Like you said, your promise isn’t over yet. Mine,” he continued, gesturing to his chest, “isn’t either. I want so much more than for people like Kamoshida and Madarame to admit that they fucked up. I want those of us on the fringes to find belonging, too, in a world where those that would outcast us don’t exist.”

“Quite a lofty goal.” Yusuke looked at Akira with respect and a little something else.   

Akira could stare at it all day.

“Don’t you kids need to get ready for school?” Sojiro chuckled, finally returning from the kitchen. “Today’s Thursday.”

“Right,” Akira could feel himself flush from being caught in a moment like that, but he couldn’t bring himself to care.

He would take embarrassment a thousand times over if he could only make Yusuke look at him – and him only – like that.

 

*

 

Kawakami was explaining something that, for the life of him, Akira couldn’t manage to stay interested in. Even though it would be on his tests in just a few weeks, he still had no motivation to do anything except consider what else he could do for Yusuke.

Likely, that day at school was going to be tough for the other boy. Most people at his school probably knew he associated with Madarame at some point and, with the famous artist’s very public confession being rebroadcast almost continually, everyone who considered themselves a part of the art world had formed an opinion one way or the other.

Morgana was giving him a look that said, “ _pay attention!_ ” but he instead reached into the desk where the feline was frowning from and checked his phone.

Yusuke had sent him something. Eagerly, he unlocked his phone and opened up the message.

<< YUSUKE(11:32): Akira, I appreciate your generosity towards me in more ways than I could possibly express. However, and if you are unavailable you ought to feel no obligation, I would love to pick your brain as it were.

<< YUSUKE(11:33): I have finished an initial composition for the piece I told you about – the one I am entering into a contest.

<< YUSUKE(11:34): I would love to have a pair of fresh eyes take a look at it.

<< YUSUKE(11:34): Again, if you find yourself otherwise occupied, feel free to ignore this request entirely.

<< YUSUKE(11:37): And thank you for this morning. Having a confidant alone is beyond rewarding, much less one as dependable as you.

Akira smiled as discretely as he could so as to avoid Kawakami’s ire.

>> AKIRA(11:49): I’d love to see your painting, Yusuke

>> AKIRA(11:49): I hope today hasn’t been too hard for you

>> AKIRA(11:50): School was crazy for a while when Kamoshida quit so, if things are hectic over where you are, we all understand

>> AKIRA(11:51): I’m glad I have you, too

>> AKIRA(11:52): Thank you for trusting me enough to tell me about yourself, it’s really brave of you

>> AKIRA(11:57): Wanna meet up at the train station after school?

After a few more minutes, his phone screen lit up once more.

<< YUSUKE(12:03): I would love to. I look forward to seeing you then.

 

***

 

“Today was not as difficult as it could have been,” Yusuke shrugged, taking his seat on the train. “In all honesty, I believe I was more the subject of pity than anything else.”

“Frustrating?” Akira sat next to Yusuke with his bag in his lap.

“To some extent, of course, as I am capable of handling my own affairs. Those who actually approached me had good intentions, though.” He seemed to think for a beat. “Where is Morgana?”

“He said he was going to enjoy the fresh air today. He’ll probably wander Yongen-Jaya for a while and get fed scraps by all the old ladies.”

Yusuke smiled. “I suppose he would be popular with that demographic.”

“So, did you go for a theme this time, or just paint something you liked?”

“You’ll see,” Yusuke assured him, placing his hand just slightly into the shared space between them. “I likely will do revisions on it, as it feels incomplete, but I am proud of it so far.”

“I’m sure you’ll do great in the competition, too. Painting’s in your blood, after all.” Akira looked fondly at him and, once more, Yusuke felt as though he would be satisfied by solely capturing that smile for the rest of his life.

 

*

 

After a short walk up, Yusuke unlocked the door to the apartment and welcomed Akira in. Not for the first time that afternoon did he consider that he would be in this space alone with the other boy, but he _did_ have a mission to accomplish first.

“You are more than welcome to take a seat while I retrieve the piece.”

“Sure, sure, take your time.”

Yusuke found the canvas where he left it and returned soon thereafter, setting it up on the easel that had stayed in the middle of the kitchen floor for a few days. On it, he placed the piece, a swirling, dark mass of something like energy forming an orb in the center and radiating from it.

“Oh, woah,” Akira grinned, standing up and taking a proper look. “All of these colors seem really… rich?”

“Every paint I used, even to create the blacks you see, would be classified as a warm color.”

“The focused effect that this huge ball gives off is cool, too.” He turned to glance at Yusuke. “So, will you tell me its name now?”

Yusuke’s face tinged a shade of pink as he said one word. “ _Desire_.”

If Akira noticed, he ignored it to return to the painting. “So, it’s like how the deepest wants people have just feeds into more wanting?”

“That certainly is an interesting interpretation,” Yusuke nodded, his hand at his chin. “You could make a wonderful art critic.”

“I think it’s because you paint accessible things,” Akira shook his head. “Anything vaguer would fly over my head.”

“I would love to go to a museum or another exhibit with you sometime to see what you thought of the works.”

“Do you have a place in mind?”

“Ah,” Yusuke frowned. “Not particularly.” For some reason, not having things planned out even for this adventure based solely on his momentary whim felt… disappointing. Like if he could work out a way to spend more time with Akira, that they might have a chance at getting together.

“That’s okay.” Akira kept his gaze on the painting. “...Is it that the object of desire will become like a black hole for the person wanting it?”

“That’s a bit darker than what I originally intended,” Yusuke mused. “However, Palaces do demonstrate that our cognition’s impulses are bent towards hurting us.”

“I wonder what you think is missing, then?”

“Something lighter, both for the composition’s sake and for the overall meaning. I find myself hesitating there, however, as though I am still stuck.”

As Yusuke spoke, the door to the apartment opened once more and Takahashi-san and Nakanohara walked through.

“Yusuke, we’re home,” Takahashi-san waved. “Oh, is this one of your friends?”

“Yes,” Yusuke gestured towards Akira. “He belonged to the group that came over the other day while you both were working.”

“Thank you for looking after Yusuke,” Nakanohara grinned. With a few steps, he strode over to the TV and turned it onto the news.

Madarame’s overly dramatic, weeping face was still plastered across the screen.

“What a bastard,” Nakanohara huffed. “He thinks that a few tears will get him out of trouble.”

“Some people are claiming that it’s the work of the Phantom Thieves,” Takahashi-san added. “While no one’s sure exactly what their motives are, they seem to have changed the mindsets of two evil people.”

“I go to the school where the gym teacher they removed taught at,” Akira commented, his voice level as if simply testing the waters.

Yusuke was impressed.

“As it stands, he was a rotten person and now he’s gone. I can’t help but think that they do good work.”

“Has Yusuke told you about our connection to Madarame?” Nakanohara asked.

“Not every detail, no,” Akira replied, glancing at Yusuke to see if the direction of the conversation bothered him.

“The old guy was basically our father figure and our means of entering into art. When he decided to steal ideas from us kids – and we really were just kids at the time – several of us changed our minds about living with him and we left.” Nakanohara muted the TV and stood up to stretch.

“We were in middle school then,” Yusuke said.

“And most of us quit art because of him, really,” Takahashi-san explained. “So, seeing him at least pretend to be sorry for his crimes against us is, well, therapeutic, I guess,” she scratched at her head. “It is interesting that you both have been close to the targets the Phantom Thieves chose.”

“There is a website,” Yusuke interrupted. “In some cases, there are threads on the site that people use to suggest targets. I suppose they simply picked ones that we happened to know.”

Akira gave him a look of confidence.

“I wonder how they can do all of it,” Nakanohara thought aloud. “Seems kinda like magic.”

“At any rate,” Takahashi-san turned to Akira. “Will you be staying for dinner with us?”

“You are more than welcome to,” Yusuke offered. “If you are busy, however, I understand.”

“Sojiro wants me to help out tonight,” Akira replied. “I’d love to take you up on it sometime later, though.”

If Yusuke had seen correctly, Nakanohara and Takahashi-san exchanged glances just then. What was that about?

“I see. I can walk you to the station, then, if you would like.”

“Yusuke, you’re too goody-goody sometimes,” Nakanohara chuckled.

“I would,” Akira smiled in response.

Once out of the range of his family’s ears, Yusuke asked, “What did you think of their questions?”

“About us?”

“Precisely.”

“I figure we’ll be hearing more of it the more people we help. Especially public figures. With bigger targets comes more notoriety.”

Yusuke hummed. “It could become increasingly difficult to hide our tracks if we do plan to do this on a larger scale.”

“Leave some of that worrying to me,” Akira grinned, bumping into Yusuke’s side. “I have a pretty good plan for a little of that. We’ll all need to use more high-tech security systems on our phones and delete our group messages pretty regularly, but we can work on building up to it.”

“I am glad that fate put you in charge of this rather than me.” Yusuke’s gaze was affectionate and tired.

Akira laughed. “I’m lucky that all of you landed in my lap. Without your support, this wouldn’t work.”

They were approaching the train station, walking down the stairs into the winding maze of platforms, turnstiles, and shops doing business. As it grew louder around them, they grew quieter. By the time they reached the specific juncture that Akira needed to swipe his train pass to get through to Yongen-Jaya, they were nearly silent.

“Thank you for showing me your painting, Yusuke,” Akira adjusted his glasses.

“I believe the thanks are all yours. You indulged me, yet again.”

With a quick scan of his card, Akira walked just beyond the area of the station that was free to roam about. He turned behind him to look at Yusuke and, with a fiercely determined expression, spoke. “Yusuke, I think I’m falling in love with you. It’s soon, and I know you probably haven’t considered it, but I want you to think about it.”

Yusuke’s jaw dropped. He nearly said something, but Akira held up a hand.

“Please. Give yourself some time to really think about it. I’m… serious about this, so I don’t want you to answer before you’re ready.”

With that, he spun around again and fled, tucking his head into his shoulders and pumping his arms along with every stride.

Frantically, Yusuke reached into all of his pockets and dug around for his train pass, some spare change, anything.

But he didn’t come prepared for it.

As Akira’s frame disappeared into the sea of people, all Yusuke could do was shake his head, faintly aware of the heat creeping up his neck.

 

***

 

“Ann, I know I don’t normally call you,” Akira sighed into the speaker of his phone. He lay on the bed, an arm flung up over his eyes to block out any remaining sunlight. He could still see the shocked expression on Yusuke’s face.

It worried him.

“What’s up?” her voice crackled through the earpiece. “Did something happen at Yusuke’s?” Her tone dropped. “Did he do something exciting?”

“No, no,” Akira rolled over onto his stomach. “I told him I liked him just after he couldn’t follow me. It was all spur of the moment, I'm not really sure why I did it then.”

“Well? What’d he say?”

“I told him to think about it,” he groaned into the sheets below him. "So I don't even know what he thinks yet."

“A _kira_ ,” Ann huffed, “You can’t make me wait for his answer, too! That’s just unfair.”

“I’ve already asked Morgana what he thinks will happen. Ryuji hasn’t answered my texts yet, either.”

“So, I’m the last resort?”

“No, you’re just my last hope of getting a definitive answer tonight.”

Her laugh rang through the phone. “I wouldn’t worry about it too much, really. He was giving you eyes all night when we were making those calling cards. Plus, after fighting Madarame when we all went our own ways?”

“Yeah?”

“Didn’t you say you two shared a bed and he was totally cool with it?”

“Yeah…”

“Then calm down! Honestly, for all that confidence you have in the Metaverse, you’re acting pretty bleak right now.”

“I love him, Ann. That’s why it’s so…”

“I know. Just wait for a while and, if he doesn’t say anything about it, we can go have a girls’ day and get our nails done.”

Akira pouted into the mic. “I wanna see Ryuji get a pedicure. Doesn’t he hate people touching his feet?”

“Yes!” She cackled. “It’s a plan, then. Hold on a little bit and then we’ll go have fun.”

“Okay. Thanks, Ann.”

“Of course, Akira.”

When he hung up the phone and sat up from his crumpled position on the bed, he noticed a text from Ryuji.

<< RYUJI(18:38): Wanna go see a movie tomorrow to get your mind off things?

Honestly, Akira didn’t know what he would do without his friends.


	12. May 30th

Yusuke took an entire day to formulate how he wanted to respond.

Everything, simply everything, had to be perfect. Akira was one of his first friends that hadn’t come directly from Madarame. Instead of pushing him, Akira was one of the most patient people he had met. His kindness was never-ending. In short, he deserved to be confessed to by someone who had an actual plan, not just a stuttering fool who could repeat back sentiment.

After he had finished up working on yet another portion his charcoal figure sketch (how many times had he contemplated giving up, realizing that summer vacation was far enough away for him to do that?), Yusuke took the quickest route to the Shibuya train station and, from there, made a beeline to the underground mall.

What he had not planned for, however, was for Rafflesia to have sold out of any of the flowers whose meanings he knew well enough.

“We’re expecting a shipment of extra blooms this evening,” Hanasaki-san explained, a sympathetic look in her eye. “I’m sure she’ll love something else we have, though.”

Yusuke didn’t have the time to correct her. When he laid eyes on the tiny cactus that sat alone on one of the displays, he picked it up and placed it on the counter in the same step.

“This will work,” he said, pulling out his wallet.

“To apologize for our poor selection, please, it’s on us,” the owner said instead.

He went with it.

After that errand had been attended to, Yusuke found himself almost flying to his shared apartment to gather up a weekend bag. Again, if his plan worked out well, he would be staying the night.

Even the thought of it – staying over with his _boyfriend_ – make his hands shake with nervousness. What if Akira had changed his mind, after all?

He slapped his face a couple of times to shake out that train of thought.

Everything was going to work out. They would, if he could work up the courage to initiate contact with Akira again, share a bed once more. It would be wonderful, and he would be the perfect date, and he would stop worrying so much over whether or not the fullest extent of his feelings were reciprocated.

With a quick jog back to the station, he boarded the one line that had a stop in Yongen-Jaya.

He may not have seen the back streets of that sleepy little corner of Tokyo very often, but he could find his way around by both the landmark shops that dotted every street corner and the smell of Leblanc wafting through the air.

The chime above the door rang and Sakura-san looked up from his work at wiping down one of the tables.

“Welcome, welcome,” he said, gesturing for Yusuke to come in.

For some reason, it felt like he was about to speak to the parents and ask permission to date Akira.

“I’m guessing you’re here for him, huh?” Sakura-san smiled as he walked over to one of the booths that a customer still sat at. “He just left, actually. I sent him on an errand for me.” In a slightly different tone of voice, he asked the customer, “Can I get anything else for you?”

“A refill, please,” the woman said, lifting her cup up to his waiting hands.

“Of course.” Back behind the counter, he spoke again to Yusuke. “He should be back any minute now. You’re welcome to head on up if you want.”

“Thank you very much,” Yusuke bowed only slightly, the nerves dancing around in his stomach making him much shakier than normal.

“I’m glad he found you, kid,” Sakura-san said a little quieter than normal. “You’re good for him.”

“T-thank you, Boss,” Yusuke managed.

“And that art piece you donated the other day,” Sakura-san gave him a sly smile, “fits in perfectly with the place, doesn’t it? I just got around to putting it up.”

The _Sayuri_ , the one with his mother’s true intentions painted into its canvas, hung along the wall the bar was on situated much closer to the door. As always, she was a captivating sight to behold.

The warmth creeping up Yusuke’s neck and into his face made him simply smile in return before he jogged up the stairs.

He placed his things down in front of the couch, placing the cactus on the shelf Akira had cleared off since even the last time he had been there. In between the time he set the plant down and arranged it so it looked its nicest, he heard the sound of footsteps coming up the stairs.

He hadn’t heard Sakura-san speak to Akira, however, so was he coming up to say something else?

Turning around, Yusuke saw the flushed face of his companion, his glasses coming down too far on his nose for Akira to truly be able to see out of.

“I have always wondered,” Yusuke said, taking steps towards Akira, “if these were fakes, considering that in the Metaverse you are simply masked.”

“Yusuke,” Akira whispered, his voice almost so quiet that the taller boy couldn’t hear.

“They were out of those adoration orchids I had heard about.”

“What?” A breathy laugh.

“The cactus. It likely holds no meaning in the language of flowers.”

“I saw _Sayuri_ downstairs. Yusuke?”

“Hm?”

“Is that your answer?”

Nothing had gone according to plan, but Yusuke couldn’t seem to care as he gently placed a hand at the nape of Akira’s neck and leaned his head down ever so slightly, meeting Akira’s lips with his.

In an instant, Akira had grasped at both sides of Yusuke’s jaw, crashing their mouths together as he smiled into it, almost laughing in the shared air space when they parted.

“Will you be my boyfriend?” Yusuke asked, their eyes locked and their mouths just a breath away from each others.

“Does this answer it?” Akira discarded his blazer, his school bag, and his glasses all in a heap in the floor. In one motion, like the thief he acted as in the Metaverse, he tugged the hair at the back of Yusuke’s head just so, licked a stripe up the unsuspecting boy’s neck, and then firmly planted a kiss at the junction of his face and jaw.

Yusuke looked out of it already, his eyes glazed over until he blinked. “I suppose so,” he swallowed.

 

***

 

“Sorry, too much?”

“Not enough,” he shook his head. “Where’s Morgana?”

“He didn’t want to come in with me. I wonder if he smelled you.”

“Perfect,” and the artist placed a hand around one of Akira’s legs and his back, picked him up much easier than Akira expected from the slender boy, and plopped him down on the bed they had shared the other night.

Akira brought his hands up to meet Yusuke’s face and card through his hair lazily. “What do you mean, _perfect_?” There was a light, teasing tone to his voice.

“I aim to not be outdone,” Yusuke replied, a smirk growing on his face. Dipping down to meet Akira’s lips once again, he titled his head so that their noses wouldn’t bump into each other. Carefully, carefully, carefully, he lifted one hand and stroked along the front of Akira’s sweater and down to the hem of it.

Akira felt dazed like he was living out some terrible, wonderful fantasy.

“May I?” Yusuke asked, toying with the bottom edge of Akira’s shirt.

“Please,” he moaned, licking his lips at the heat in Yusuke’s gaze already. “Fuck, Yusuke, you can’t look at me like that,” he almost laughed out.

“And why not?” The other boy slowly inched Akira’s shirt up his torso, tracing patterns with just the barest touch of his fingertips against Akira’s skin as he went.

“I haven’t gotten off in a while, not really since Morgana’s been here. You’ll make me cum in my — _mm_.”

Yusuke had pinched Akira’s nipple with just the edge of his fingers. “What?”

“There are people downstairs, too,” Akira groaned, covering his eyes with the palms of his hands.

Quickly, the other boy lifted off of him and sat up, moving his hands to either side of Akira’s torso instead. “Would you like to stop, then?”

“Not at all,” Akira laughed, sitting up and pushing Yusuke back at once. “I haven’t even heard you, yet.”

Yusuke was hot to the touch, and even as Akira started off with much sweeter (if not more possessive) kisses pressed to Yusuke’s pulse along his neck and arms, the other boy began to burn as red as he looked.

“I don’t exactly have that impressive of stamina, myself,” Yusuke whispered out in a choppy breath. “We might be evenly matched.”

“How disappointing,” Akira teased, laying an elbow at the side of Yusuke’s head and leaning in to nibble at his earlobe. Directly in his ear, Akira faked a moan, higher pitched than necessary, just to see what sort of reaction he would get.

He heard the blankets shift. With a quick peek, Akira saw both Yusuke grabbing at the sheets with his hands and the lovely tent in his pants that matched Akira’s own.

“Does this turn you on, _my Yusuke_?” he moaned to punctuate the end of his sentence, scraping just enough of his top teeth against Yusuke’s ear to make the boy under his squirm. Experimentally, he shifted his weight just a smidge onto him, resting a knee in between Yusuke’s legs.

“What, do you want to be mine?” Akira knew he channeled Joker’s cockiness, then, all bravado overlaying a thick layer of his own nervous energy. He kissed the side of Yusuke’s face, moving slowly inward until he skipped over the other boy’s mouth.

Yusuke pouted, his hips jutting up the tiniest bit, and moaned something like, “Hmph.”

“I thought you said you were going to outdo me,” Akira shifted yet again, outlining Yusuke’s hips with his own, hovering just enough over the other boy’s clothed erection that he could make a threat like that.

“I may disappoint, instead,” Yusuke sighed as Akira leaned in again for another kiss. His lips were soft, pliant, and all Akira could think while his mouth was pressed against them was how _wonderful_ it was to finally be able to do this.

When they moved off of each other for the moment, Akira put a hand to his chest. “I don’t think I realized how much I wanted you,” he laughed, knowing his face was red with embarrassment.

Yusuke looked similarly frazzled.

“Something wrong?” Akira put his hand to Yusuke’s forehead.

“I am not used to being touched, much less like this,” the other boy admitted, his eyes glassy and red-rimmed.

It looked like he was about to cry.

“I’d like to do something about that, then.”

Gently, with one hand supporting Yusuke’s back, Akira pushed up the other boy’s shirt with his hand.

“Is this alright, Yusuke?”

“Most certainly,” he breathed, voice trembling. “But what do you plan to do now?”

“Mm, let’s actually get rid of this, if you don’t mind,” Akira’s heart felt warm and fond inside him as he saw Yusuke’s thin frame contrasted against his sheets.

Akira began undoing the buttons of Yusuke’s shirt with some help from him, making quick work of it, and they discarded it to the side for later. With all of the self-control he had in him, Akira merely ghosted his fingers over the freshly exposed skin.

“You’re so pale, Yusuke,” he said, once again framing the other boy under him with his legs and giving him the slightest of nips at his collarbone. “You’re beautiful.”

If it were possible, the blue-haired boy underneath him grew even redder.

Joker slipped out again as Akira rested himself against Yusuke’s thighs, settling himself in between his legs. With the same featherlight touch, he scratched his fingernails against the hint of muscle definition Yusuke had on his lower torso, felt along the swells of his hip bones, and finally cupped his lower back in one hand.

“Delicious,” he moaned out, licking his lips.

“Akira,” Yusuke groaned, bringing his hands up to cover his face. “If you are intent on teasing me like this, I may not be able to last.”

Akira let out a shuttering sigh. “Me neither,” he chuckled, placing his shaking hands around Yusuke’s shoulders. “I’m all talk today.”

Yusuke leaned back and propped himself up on his elbows to get a better look into Akira’s face. “I would offer to use the bathroom downstairs to give you some privacy, as well, but,” he gulped, “I believe it is still within business hours.”

“Y-you don’t have to leave, silly,” Akira smiled, screwing his face up in an almost confused expression. “If you want to,” he scooted back on the bed so that his face was, at Yusuke’s eyeline, half-covered by the other boy’s erection. “I’ll do something good for you, instead.”

“I want to feel you too,” Yusuke looked the other way, biting his lip and looking so flustered that Akira wanted to take a picture for when he was alone, was confident with himself, wasn’t so nervous over what to do with his hands.

“While I am sure that you are more comfortable with this, having done it all before,” Yusuke continued, just barely making eye contact with Akira who hadn’t left his perch, “you would be my first.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about, you’re mine, too,” Akira confessed, climbing his way up Yusuke’s long body so that he could rest his jaw on the other boy’s chest. “I hadn’t even kissed anyone until just then.”

“R-really?” For some reason, this seemed to send Yusuke even further over the edge. His arms came up to wrap around Akira, closing in on him tightly as if he was scared to let go. “I would have thought otherwise, considering how you seem to have infinite composure.”

“It’s all an act,” he kissed one of Yusuke’s nipples since it was so close to his face. The boy underneath him squirmed. “Plus,” he looked back up at him, “you were doing so well, too, until you got too stuck in your own head.”

One of the hands that was closing in on Akira moved to tickle his side. “As if you were any different, _Joker_.”

Feeling brave again, Akira reached down with one of his hands and groped at Yusuke’s crotch. “Ahh, you’re softer again,” he pouted. “What a shame.”

“What did you have in mind, exactly?” Yusuke acted incredulous even as he melted into the touch. “I thought we were through, so…”

“If you want to be, I do love just being close like this,” Akira grinned. “Ah, but maybe I should take my shirt off, too, so it’s even.”

“Well, if it for the sake of balance, of course,” Yusuke sat up, dragging Akira with him, and helped Akira out of his suspenders and turtleneck. “You blush even on your chest, then, _hm_ ,” he whispered excitedly, reaching out a hand but not touching.

Akira took Yusuke’s hand in his own and placed it on top of his heart, giving him a toothy smile. “You really are a thief, after all, you know?”

“What, did I steal your heart,” Yusuke mused, using the hand that wasn’t feeling all up and down Akira’s chest to pull them much closer together.

“Exactly,” Akira answered, going in for another kiss at Yusuke’s wet, swollen lips. His mouth migrated southerly, and as he sucked at one spot that made Yusuke shiver particularly deliciously, he climbed back into the other boy’s lap.

In that moment, when the pressure of Akira’s ass hit Yusuke’s clothed erection, he bit his lip and screwed his eyes shut.

“Did I hurt you?” Akira asked, lifting himself off suddenly.

“Not at all, please,” Yusuke said, his brows still knit together and his pupils blown so wide Akira thought he had lost all other colors in his eyes. “Please, come back.”

With Akira re-situated on top of him, Yusuke lay his head on his partner’s shoulder. “It’s just – there’s almost enough friction, you see – and I am entirely too weak for this,” he managed, breathing heavily against Akira’s skin.

Experimentally, Akira bucked his hips rather purposefully onto Yusuke, making sure that the swell of his own hardness met Yusuke’s.

“You truly are a devil, I am convinced,” Yusuke’s nails dug into Akira’s back, clawing for some sort of grounding hold.

“Ahh,” Akira could only think aloud, “you really will make me show how much of a pervert I am, won’t you, Yusuke?”

The boy underneath him looked up at him warmly, with the most strained, pleading eyes he had ever seen. “I suppose, if I were to be a pervert, I would prefer it to be with you.”

Akira held onto Yusuke’s shoulders and dragged themselves together again, barely panting out, “I’d hope so, since I’m your boyfriend, right?”

The grip Yusuke had on Akira’s back tightened incrementally, as if he may have wanted to leave marks but was nervous to leave any traces of his having been there.

“I – I’ve heard that foxes like to bite each other when they mate,” Akira tried to wink, but he was too much of a mess. His hips stuttered against Yusuke’s again. “So you’re more than welcome to if you want.”

“Why, you,” Yusuke shook his head, laughing to himself. He grabbed at the back of Akira’s neck and pushed their lips together again just as they ground against each other. “I suppose if I did so, it would need to be below here, hm?” He asked, rubbing with his thumb at the bottom of Akira’s hairline. “So that your uniform would cover it.”

“Y-Yusuke,” was all Akira breathed.

“You were the one who suggested it, not me,” Yusuke responded, feeling his face grow even hotter as another wave of embarrassment cascaded onto him. “I am hardly responsible when — ” He tucked his head down, his breathing erratic if not frantic, and his whole body rumbled with him as he moaned through gritted teeth.

“Ahh,” Akira felt proud of himself if for nothing else than holding on just a smidgen longer, still rolling and crashing their hips together. “Did my Yusuke cum in his pants?”

“Please, look away from me now,” Yusuke didn’t lift his head, his hands drooping off of Akira’s back and moving to cover up what surely was a stain forming.

Akira pulled off of him, pooling himself just in front of Yusuke, and gave the other boy an interested look. “Can I see?”

“This is incredibly shameful, somehow,” Yusuke muttered.

To reassure his partner, Akira placed a hand on Yusuke’s upper thigh. “I think it’s incredibly hot, actually,” he said. “I – I really want to see your dick, too, if that’s okay — ”

Yusuke’s head jerked up, his hand coming to cover his mouth. Somehow, he looked even more flustered than when he was writhing under Akira’s ministrations.

“If it’s as beautiful as the rest of you, I want to know. That’s only fair, right?”

“It isn’t that I am _unwilling_ ,” Yusuke coughed, giving Akira a self-conscious look. “I just did not expect things to turn out quite like this,” he gestured vaguely to his crotch.

Truly, the wet spot that was seeping through Yusuke’s uniform was tempting enough that Akira wanted to put his mouth on it, to suck an even larger stain into the middle seam of those pants, to feel Yusuke tremblingly clutch at his hair as he shook another orgasm from his _boyfriend_ —

“You’re drooling, Akira,” Yusuke squeaked.

“I think I understand what you mean, Yusuke,” he cleared his throat, noticing the tiniest freckles that dotted Yusuke’s nose for the first time. “It’s… a lot, when there are emotions involved, huh?”

“Precisely.”

“I might just leave it alone and let it go down by itself,” Akira sighed, finally moving his hand away from Yusuke’s thigh.

“N-no, please,” the other boy suggested, “let me try something different if it is alright.”

“What are you thinking, then?”

Yusuke raised himself to a kneeling position and, undoing his belt, he freed himself from his pants and leaned over to Akira. “I could use my hands on the both of us,” he said, his arms shaking from holding him up.

“Yes,” was Akira’s immediate reply, his hands already making quick work of his own clothes. “Yes,” he repeated, shaking his head a little _too_ excitedly.

“Come closer, then.”

With both of them touching again, Akira could feel the fire that had become his blood swirling around in him once more. He almost went dizzy with it, the way Yusuke’s lightly calloused, larger hands took the both of them into one palm and stroked them together.

“Ngh,” Yusuke groaned, gritting his teeth again. “It is too soon again for me, but I want to make you feel good, too,” he pouted.

Akira placed his hand on top of Yusuke’s unoccupied one and, with a needy whine in his voice, whispered, “But I want to cum with you.”

“You truly intend to ruin me, do you not?”

“Please?”

Yusuke hung his head and returned to his previous pace. Even though he looked tense, Akira could tell by the way his cock twitched against his own that it was simply overstimulation.

“You really are much bigger than me, though,” Akira commented, his voice a little harried. “I wonder if you’ll ever fit.”

“ _What_?” Yusuke faltered, louder than he needed to be.

“What, do you not want to be inside me some day?”

“I-if you are able to think about such things,” Yusuke picked up his pace, jerking them a little more roughly together, “then clearly I am not doing my job well enough.”

“Oh, you want me in you, is that it?” Akira could feel himself nearing the edge, but he couldn’t find it in himself to stop playing with Yusuke simply to get a rise out of him.

“Will this teasing finally end when you are sated?” Yusuke hissed, rubbing his thumb prolongedly at the bead of precum that had welled up on Akira’s cock long ago. “Or is this mouth of yours a feature that you hide when seducing people?”

“Only for you,” Akira closed one eye, tensing up a little. “Yusuke, I’m close, please — ”

With a movement so quick Akira’s brain didn’t have time in its current state to process it, Yusuke tugged at Akira’s thighs until his ass was squarely situated against Yusuke’s legs, his own in the air all of a sudden.

Akira was about to question why the shift when, with a jolt, he came _hard_ as Yusuke took a bite out of the meat of his thigh and looked him directly in the eyes. Yusuke’s gaze was so… tangible, it felt, as though all of the artist’s immense, reductive focus was directed solely at him. As though his hands were in more places than just his cock and his calf.

“ _Fuck_ me, Yusuke, what was that about?” Akira had his hands on his head, wiping the sweat-clinging hair out of his face.

“You said you wanted me to,” Yusuke answered simply, pressing a flurry of kisses and salving licks to the bite mark he had left. “Did I misunderstand you?”

“Not at all,” Akira swallowed, reaching for Yusuke lazily. “I just didn’t expect you to go for it.”

“I must apologize,” he helped Akira to sit up and glanced guiltily at the place he had bitten. “I do think it will leave something.”

“Both of our thieves’ outfits have high collars,” Akira smiled, “and your hair is long enough in the back, too. My uniform has a turtleneck. I don’t think you have to worry about any marks anywhere, much less my upper leg.”

“If you are sure,” Yusuke felt the corners of his lips turning up. “I must admit,” he smiled, placing a hand on his heart, “I am a bit proud of myself for holding on as long as I did. As I said, what little physical affection I receive is rare at best.” He seemed a little embarrassed to say it, the crinkles at the sides of his eyes appearing. “Though that may be changing now, it is hard to say.”

Akira’s heart skipped a beat. “You really are a good boy, Yusuke,” he shook his head, pulling Yusuke into a tight embrace. His hand carded through Yusuke’s hair, appreciating the soft sighs his partner gave at the touch. “If you’d let me, I’d spoil you rotten.”

A bit of wickedness melted its way into Yusuke’s upward gaze, one hand pressing a little at the bruise he had left in Akira’s thigh. “I believe the feeling is thoroughly mutual.”

Akira’s expression steeled a bit, to Yusuke’s surprise. “You know, now that you’re my boyfriend,” he let his eyes go soft, “you have to tell me when things are bothering you. You have to lean on me more.”

Yusuke scrambled to his knees, his face just as serious. “I could same the same thing about you, you know! While I may be bad at reading the room, I can still see when you need someone to talk to. Please,” he pleaded just a little, his hands wrapping around one of Akira’s, “Rely on me.”

Akira closed his eyes, all sweetness and soft sighs. “I leave myself in your care, then.”

Leaning in just enough, Yusuke barely pressed their lips against each other. “Likewise,” he whispered, his open mouth going in for another, if not lazier, kiss.

They stayed that way for quite some time, the tiniest moans escaping in the millimeter of space they left in between their mouths, eyes closed, hands clasping at the other’s back.

“Let’s go take a bath,” Yusuke suggested without any further explanation.

“Only if you will wash my hair,” Akira could feel his face grow warm with a combination of excitement and embarrassment, but he also couldn’t find it in himself to care.

“Gladly.”


	13. May 31st

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Epilogue.

The next morning, Yusuke opened his eyes to the sleeping face of his boyfriend. Akira’s arm was, albeit lazily, draped over Yusuke’s middle and the hand that had pulled him in close still held on into the next day.

Quietly, the pitter patter of the rain drumming against the window seemed to want to lull him back to sleep.

It was then that Akira awoke and, smiling as warmly as Yusuke had ever seen, placed the briefest of kisses to the tip of Yusuke’s nose.

“Good morning,” Akira whispered in the near-silence of their embrace.

“And good morning to you, too,” Yusuke beamed back at him.

With just a slight movement, Akira rolled himself on top of Yusuke and settled his head into the juncture between his neck and his shoulder.

“I’m afraid you might suffocate that way, Akira.” There was concern in his voice as his arms went to hold the other boy.

Akira sat up, bedhead just as disheveled as possible, and put a glowering expression on his face. “If you don’t let me cuddle you, I’ll make you cum.”

“How can you possibly say something like that with such a childish pout?” Yusuke reached a hand up to poke at Akira’s protruding lip.

With all the nonchalance of a Sunday morning, Akira angled his hips so that he could properly rut against Yusuke. “Like this.”

Yusuke grimaced, a smile underneath it all, “You must really enjoy that considering it appears to be your go-to.”

“Kitagawa,” Akira murmured darkly, desire and sleep in his eyes, “don’t tempt me.” He punctuated his words with shallow thrusts of his hips, his hands framing Yusuke’s in a somewhat inescapable hold.

Not that he was trying to leave. “Nn,” Yusuke threw his head back and groaned, half-bitten off into a pillow. “It is much too early for such stimulation.”

“This friend says otherwise,” came the snarky reply, Akira’s pointer finger pressing firmly on Yusuke’s cockhead through his pants. “I think he wants some attention.”

“While that may be the case,” Yusuke shifted, sitting up and forcing Akira into a leaning back position, still attached at the hips. “I do not believe I would want to hold back after being in your arms all night.”

Akira brushed a piece of Yusuke’s bangs out of his hair, enjoying the way that the flush worked its way onto his face. “You’re not too big for my mouth,” he said suggestively, a sly smirk plastered onto him.

“You are a dangerous man,” Yusuke huffed, leaning forward towards Akira’s stomach.

“And your boner was poking me in the ass half the night,” Akira replied plainly. “So, either let me suck you off or let me hold you in my arms again.”

“I — ” Yusuke started to stutter, but Akira held up a finger to his lips.

Unhurriedly, he traced the rises and falls of Yusuke’s mouth, staring with squinted eyes up at the artist. “Or do you want to kiss me until you go dizzy?”

Yusuke swallowed.

Akira’s hand cupped Yusuke’s face. “Any of the three sound perfect to me if you were wondering.”

“You are an insatiable force,” Yusuke chuckled, the gravel in his voice from just waking up doing even more things to Akira’s heart.

“We  _could_ also head to Mementos and see if foxes are self-lubricating,” Akira gave him a wink.

“I believe you would be hard pressed to find a harder set of decisions to lay before me.”

Leaning back on his elbows, Akira adjusted himself so that he sat properly in Yusuke’s lap. “Well, until you decide,” he hummed, running a hand against the cool plane of Yusuke’s chest, “I’ll just busy myself here.”

Quick nips followed in succession by the even faster work of a flicking tongue against Yusuke’s neck had him positively squirming, a panting, groaning mess, and Akira  _loved_ it.

Yusuke couldn’t complain, either. “P-please,” he moaned, his arms curled around Akira even as his waist bucked into the touch.

“Please what?” the other boy smiled against his skin, blowing cool air against the column of his neck.

“Your mouth,” Yusuke’s voice cracked.

“Wonderful choice,” and Akira pulled off him again, crawling backwards and watching eagerly as Yusuke pulled the waistband of his pajama pants down far enough. “ _Itadakimasu_ ,” he cheered in a hushed tone as he took Yusuke in one hand and began licking a stripe up his length.

“Despicable, horrible _pervert_ ,” Yusuke whimpered, a hand already impulsively tugging at Akira’s hair, pulling him off.

“The worst,” Akira grinned, shaking loose and taking as much of his boyfriend in as he could, leaving the exposed, wet flesh to tremble as he slowly moved back up. His eyes met Yusuke’s. “You look hungry,” he said, laying his head on Yusuke’s thigh and lazily rubbing his forefinger just under the ridge at the top of the other’s cock.

“Dreadfully so,” Yusuke replied, mouth agape.

“Would you like to go eat first?”

“I see a perfectly good meal in front of me,” said the artist, a tremble of nerves in his voice as he moved to hover over Akira, pulling at his pants and looking for a sign of disagreement in his lover’s eyes.

Instead, he found warmth, affection, and  _wanting_.

Indelicately, he spat into his hand and began tugging at Akira’s length, a little faster than he might have liked on himself to start off with.

“Ahh, now who’s the bad man?” Akira moaned, the words tumbling from his mouth as he breathed through it, his face a splotchy, red mess.

“Your boyfriend.” Yusuke licked his lips and pressed a gentle kiss to Akira’s length.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you all for sticking through it! I dearly hope you enjoyed reading it as much as I did writing it. It's my first finished long-form work in a while and, because I wrote it all in nine days, I'm even happier with how it turned out.
> 
> I hope we'll meet again!


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